The Rothman Letter is resurrected from days past

THE ROTHMAN LETTER | QUARTERLY REVIEW

In this somewhat quarterly rant, I will endeavor to enlighten you (and myself) about what is going on from the twenty thousand foot level on the Internet and in the world.

INTERESTING NEWS:

According to Google, we are the number one social media advertising agency in the world (Adweek.com is a well known magazine, not and agency.)

I have been talking about his for a while:

http://socialmediasystems.com/blog/interactive-agency-renenue/

This is significant because we are not really a conventional agency, and there are larger competitors: the point is that conventional agencies do not understand the Internet:  Adweek.com, the only website higher than us on this prestigious search, did so with this article from 2008;

http://www.adweek.com/aw/content_display/news/digital/e3id13cf7c770b633b60456549756b829bc

How fitting!

As they pointed out (nearly two years ago, LOL) , and as I have been saying for years: the model has built-in conflicts of interests between the consultants (the agency) and it’s clients: because the compensation model does not reward the agency for choosing cost-effective organic search and viral marketing techniques, since the agency is paid based on the ongoing budget, rather than the results.

We do not really covet to manage  ad budgets for PPC and other expensive advertising; that is not why we target the search: we simply conquest this audience to share our viewpoint that organic search and viral video advertising have a place in the mix, regardless of resistance to change in the main- stream advertising circles for the reasons mentioned.

The new models will become more defined next year, and I look for interactive and ‘viral’ agency models to find their own once and for all.

The selling of consultative services to small businesses has always been problematic, for several reasons:

• There is a great deal of noise: far too many very poorly planned offerings with very little value are being spread in spammy ways (like bombarding your email with spam) which confuses and further obscures the better offerings
• The clients do not listen until it is too late: most businesses still fail, not because of  opportunity costs (it costs almost nothing to start a business these days) but because the business is started without planning, too easily, by someone who has no real life experience with the many challenges that a small business must overcome to succeed.
• Small business people cannot handle ‘the truth’: motivated by vanity and greed, small business entrepreneurs have a tendency to ignore the facts until they are un-aviodable, which is often too late to make the necessary changes and move on: managing a small business is about tough decisions.
• Businesses are still under-capitalized – this is amazing to me since it is so very much less expensive to get actually into business than it used to: now that only a website and business card are required to be able to do immediate test marketing, people try to skimp-on and shortcut even these minor expenses, at the cost of failure.

TRENDS:

The competition is heating up here:

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&=&q=social+media+agency+services&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=&aqi=

Very soon (perhaps by the end of December, 2009) we will relaunch http://socialmediasystems.comas a proprietary application built on Ruby-on-Rails: all of our consultative and movie-making services and ventures will be promoted through our sites at :

http://moviepals.org(be sure to see the new Drupal application launched here today!)

http://rothmanmarketing.com(this is the new sales site for our services, my writing and speaking activities)

http://cityscoop.us (this is my reseller John Kits, Cityscoop.us is a localized, white-label version of our WordpressMUsetup, where a local business can be exposed to local traffic, get instant local rankings on Google,  join a coupon-banner rotation, receive weekly training and support and more for only $489 per year – this is s good example of how what we do can be a local business plan  for a local online-mall or even online newspaper or radio show.  You can purchase Cityscoop positions from me or directly from John.  Cityscoop.us is a separate company, so I may refer you to this product of I already have an exclusive client in your space: I am exclusive to my clients and recently have had to refer a couple of them to John because of that.  You can be sure that John’s clients appear on top og target Google searches, as do ours.

http://iknowjack.org This is a brand-new, pet project.  during this recession, we found ourselves wishing we were not so dependent on Realtors as clients: Jack is my next-door-neighbor: he is very connected with the whole and natural foods industries, and he has been for many years.  He helps farmers and manufacturers get worthwhile offerings on the shelves in major shopping chains and places like Whole Foods: he knows the players, the history, the brokers and the ‘drill’ in general in this huge, growing industry.  We are moving into this vertical as a target market with millions of holistic practitioners, doctors, consultants, manufacturers, restaurants to contact.   iknowjack.org is a brand-new MU setup where we can add a whole blog similar to cityscoop.us very inexpensively, already setup and ready to rank for whatever you write about.  This portal will have a value of it’s own, be able to rank the clients and advertisers for very tall whole foods and natural healing searches.

I have added some very good posts from my client Dr. Nirvana (drnirvana.com) to start the conversation, in an RSS feed widget on the lower right at inkowjack.org

HOT TIPS:  If you have not signed up for Google local business center, and Windows live local business center, DO IT NOW!  It is free, takes only a few minutes, and will put your telephone number and map at the top pof the searches you choose for local business.  Someday this wil not be free, but, for now, it stil is, so take advantage of it!   Make sure you choose industry designations, and key words that will get you business when people look for a local company to do business with.

MARKETING A BOOK 101:  We have a great deal of inquiries about this lately: our apporach does not include submitting a query letter to Doubleday:

1. Setup a properly optimized blog
2. Syndicate the blog through Technorati, Mybloglog, (all over) in an RSS feed.
3. Start Blogging the book: that;s right, just start posting one chapter at a time, building a following.
4. Offer a Paypal buy-it-now button on every page in a widget, so that they can go ahead and pay a nominal amount to either download a PDF and.or get a printed version or dvd.

You may also consider beginning to do each chapter as a digital movie, so that it can be used, depending onthetopic, to educate and/or entertain an entire room.  This can all be done with our $479 offering , either on our system at http://socialmediasystems.com/blog/ ; or to coincide with the launch activities we are doing now at http://inkowjack.org (for natural food, medicine topics) or at http://cityscoop.usfro bricks-and-morter small businesses who need to network on a more local platform, with more support.

http://socialmediasystems.com will become like an ebay for social media products and services, and we wil simply be one of the vendors there: thus this, the relaunch of Rothmanmarketing.com, to provide links, support, and sales organization of independent resellers selling these services and others.  Please share your thoughts and ideas with me: israel@rothmanmarketing.com and/or simply join in with your own blog, pictures, movies, and whatever else you have to say here: http://3netsocial.ning.com/

And/or here:

http://marketing.moviepals.org/ (our collaborative media meet up group where we have occasional free classes in the LA area for fledgeling Social Media Marketers

And/or here:

http://singles.meetup.com/598/ A large local singles group I am assistant organizer for (Meetup is a wonderful way to market any business)

And/or here:

http://activerain.com/groups/WEB20 (my nearly 800 person Activerain.com Web 2.0 Group)

and/0r here:

http://www.realtown.com/Israel/groups/socialmediamarketing (My Realtown group)

For those of you who do not get it: This is ’social media marketing’; this opt-in list server, what you are reading, these vertical blog sites, the groups, the articles…  Social media is everything from a branded BIO photo, to a Gravitar, to blogging, video, text, T Shirts..

Social media is THE MEDIA. evidenced by the fact that the fastest way to get on the main-stream media is to get popular on Youtube, and there is more and more time on prime news and other shows being allocated to what we actually care about: Youtube!

Until next time (about three months):

I am Israel Rothman: israel@rothmanmarketing.com

Special until the end of October, 2009: get a custom made ‘pitch video’ of the same quality and length as the one at http://socialmediasystems.com, complete with script writing, green screen work, staff actors, web-ready and HD formats, for the special price of $799: see http://rothmanmarketing.com/digital-video/

Bookmark It