This is my series of 30 brief interactive marketing tips. I’m posting each business day at 8:30 a.m. EST. Catch them all by subscribing to my blog or bookmarking the site. All of the posts will be tagged “30 interactive marketing tips” and listed on this page.
#2 – Spend At Least 5% of Your Time Experimenting
Budgets are tight. Time is scarce. Everything and everyone is competing for your attention and dollars. That’s why you’re life is full of RFPs, metrics and goals. You need to know exactly what return your getting for your investment and attention.
The problem is that if you only spend your time on the comfortable and predictable that you could be missing out on opportunity in emerging fields. There’s no guaranteed return except for the increased knowledge you get.
I recommend dedicating at least 5% of your time to experimenting and exploring. That’s 8 hours a month for a normal working schedule.
Here are some areas to poke around in:
Twitter – Micro-blogging platform Twitter simply answers the question “What are you doing now?”. The community that’s built around it has exploded the use from this simple question to blog promotion. There are even competitors like Jaiku and Pownce (My Friends Hate Pownce).
Facebook Social Ads – Ignoring the whole Facebook Beacon issue, you can still launch targeted display or text ads on a CPM or CPC basis. It only takes about 30 minutes to get an ad up and running (less if you’re not as fussy as I) and you can start measuring thereafter.
Podcasts – Advertising on podcasts is not easily organized at the moment, but you can at least start listening to some. iTunes is the definitive source at the moment.
Blogging – Well, you’re reading a blog, so you’re probably ahead of the game. You’d be amazed how many people aren’t.
Why don’t you start one? Literally, commit to 3 posts or start one for inside your company or department. It’s pretty simple if you sign up for the hosted version with Blogger, WordPress or Typepad.
You’ll get a better sense of how they work and quickly come to realize that content is king/queen and no one is going to magically show up at your blog.
As you get a sense of how users of each of these medium differ, you’ll start to understand what fits for your needs and what doesn’t. Of course, you could also just wait 2 years until one of these is mainstream…
