Are you searching, or are you finding?

It’s a well worn phrase, but ‘people don’t buy a drill, they buy a hole in the wall’, put another, less elegant way, consumers buy things, not to have them but for what obtaining the object does, or says, for the individual.

So are you searching or finding? Is a search engine really a search engine? Or is it more of a ’show me everything relevant on XYZ topic’ engine?

With Google’s superbowl ad, which has been on their youtube account since November, is possibly the finest display of this theory and displaying a level self-brandawareness that most companies struggle to find, if ever.

Google understands implicitely their role in helping you find what you’re looking for. Their ability to get rid of you quickly so you’ll keep coming back has been well documented.

Take a look around your business and see if you truly understand why people are using your products and services and if you’re confident you do, try demonstrating it more. Be sure to find out how various groups are using your product, and perhaps focus on the core consumers that are your most reliable, re-purchasing ones.

Finding more of them might just be what your business needs.

Running

When you’re running, you think you know your limits.

You know how long you want to run for, how far you want to run, or how much you want to improve by.

It’s only natural to set a goal and reach it. It’s easy setting your own goals, because most people set them knowing they can reach them. But it’s much harder mentally to reach that pre-determined goal and just keep on going, just to see, for the pure experiment of it, exactly how long you can keep on going and how far you can get.

You see it every day with people running at the gym, they set the machine for the specific metrics they want – time, calories, incline etc – and then they just stop when they reach it.

But what if they decided, ‘to hell with being late to dinner I’m just going to keep on going’. I bet they’d be surprised by their results.

What’s a greater achievement: hitting something you know you could, or setting a new record?

It can and should be like that with marketing too. Don’t aim to hit your target by the end of the month, aim to hit it two thirds of the way through the month and then keep on going.

Don’t be daunted with negative thoughts about future expectation, exceed what’s expected today and you’ll find it easier to do so in the future too.

Missing twitter

Technically I had to tweet during my hiatus, for work, not personal, and as a result I can’t actually remember my login for twitter now.

I haven’t gone back to it for personal use just yet, because for the majority of the people I was following on twitter, I was, and still am, visiting their sites anyway marketingmag , mashable , etc  – I’m looking in your direction.

I’m not sure I’m not missing out on something by not using twitter all that much. Weighing up the benefits received from it last time vs the time spent on it, it’s a hard ask to jump back onto it right now.

I don’t miss twitter because for the most part there isn’t that connection like with Facebook. FB’s focus on connecting with friends, with opinions you trust, as opposed to ‘following’ strangers, who may sell their tweets for cash, raises concerns.

And maybe I’m not alone on this one, checking Compete.com it looks like twitter’s traffic isn’t just stalling, it’s falling:

Will it be abandoned? Most likely not, there’s too many interested parties to let it go the way of the dodo, but will it become an essential unmissable tool for communication on daily basis? Not for a while yet, not for me anyway.

Ah blogging, did I miss you too?

Ah blogging, that slightly-older-uncle in the ‘new media’ family.

You know what? I missed it, I missed it like crazy. I missed being a part of a conversation, I missed contributing, but more importantly I missed listening, reading and seeing other people’s opinions. Blogging, in my opinion, is one of the best things you can get into, even if you’re just a lurker for a while first.

Forrester Research did some amazing, well, research about percentages of people who create, engage, use, comment and lurk, it’s below (until they ask me to remove it)

I suppose it comes back to an issue of feeling like you’re part of a group, an immersion, so to speak, as Seth Godin would call it, a tribe. But it’s also worth considering that’s it more than just being a part of something. It’s is about being heard in that group. You’re not just a follower, you’re a contributor, even if your voice is small and only a few people hear it, at least it was heard.

Cutting off the blogging voice for a while, was an experience I don’t intend on repeating but one worth enduring.

No TV for a few months

Going without television, it turns out, is a lot easier than originally thought. An enormous amount of time was freed up to dedicate to other things that just don’t get done when zoned out in front of the television for hours.

It’s been hard to get back into the tv watching routine for the second half of this experiment too – when there’s no emotional connection to the characters, or coming in halfway through a series you quickly find yourself just not caring what happens during the show.

To try and get back into the television watching groove, three distinctly different programs were chosen: CSI Miami (because it’s one of Australia’s most watched shows) and then the more ‘niche’ programs including some Saturday morning cartoons and Beauty and the Geek.

The programs aside, I wanted to see what the marketing and advertising was like during these shows and see how targeted it was. The short answer is that much of the advertising during the commercials seems to be very much a scattergun approach.

This blog post may seem about 5 years too late but bear with me because the television hiatus was such a stark ‘punch in the face’ as to the reasons why marketing budgets are moving elsewhere and why it’s incredibly hard to target anything on television.

More often than not there didn’t seem to be any connection from the advertiser to either the audience or the program, where there was one, it was a loose association at best.

For example during the Saturday morning cartoons, one of the ad’s was the new ‘know when to declare’ anti-binge drinking commercial – I didn’t understand why kids would want an anti-drinking commercial when they’re not drinking at all. If anything, it exposed them to the idea of drinking because the guy in the ad was having a really great time with friends. A while watching CSI, a commercial for a laxative product was crammed in between an ad for another Channel 9 show and a car commercial.

Perhaps this is an over analysis, but what is the person at the end of a three minute ad break really meant to be thinking? Should they watch the new show, get a laxative and drive to the closest loo in a new car?

And yes, advertisers can choose to be placed in certain segments or timeslots for more targeted efforts, or risk it and hope they end up somewhere other than 3am, but it seems, at least initially that that ‘risk it’ money could be better spent online in a more targeted fashion.

Even if the product is aiming to appeal to a mass market, there’s must be core buyers – why not spend the money on targeting them?