[This is a reprint of a post that originally appeared on my blog, Dose of Digital]
Do you know all of your national capitals?
Quick.
The capital of Norway.
Got it? Stumped?
Stay tuned for the correct answer.
For those of you who learned and remembered this type of information from your grade school days, congratulations. Geography is a tough subject for most of us. There was a time (not too long ago) when it would have been pretty challenging to find the answer to this question if you didn't learn it at some point in the past and remember it. For those who didn't know the answer and "Googled" it, accidentally stumbled upon the point of today's post.
Recall a time not too long ago when you didn't have Internet access. If you wanted to find out a capital of a country, you didn't have much choice but to look it up in a book. If you had some encyclopedia's on hand, you could find it there. You might even find it in one of those giant unabridged dictionaries or an almanac. If you didn't have any of those, you were out of luck. You could call... Read more
Archive for Jonathan Richman 
Forget Content: Why Cataloging and Calculations Should Be King
14 Things To Help Inspire Your Digital Marketing in 2010
As you catch up on all the emails you missed over the holidays and wonder where to start on your massive list of "to-dos," I'm going to recommend you take a moment for a quick read. Today's post is really simple. It's not another "XYZs of the DECADE!" or "The Most Important Things of 2010" type post, of which I'm sure you're seeing plenty. [Note: This is a re-post from my "regular" blog, Dose of Digital, but thought it was worth sharing here as well.]
Instead, I wanted to start you off with some things that are sure to recharge your creative thinking. I plan to show you things that might amuse, inspire, upset, annoy, confuse, encourage, frustrate, and all of these at once. While I typically write about healthcare related topics, this post is for every marketer out there. There are quite a few healthcare examples included (I can't help it), but the vast majority have nothing whatsoever to do with healthcare.
What you aren't going to get here is a list of things to do. I'm not going to show you a bunch of ideas to copy. You're going to have to work a bit to figure out the... Read more
8 Tips to Help You Own YouTube Search
I've talked a lot about search engine marketing (both paid and organic) elsewhere (check out all of my posts on this topic here , here and here) and yet, as I continue to attend conferences, I don't hear anything about the giant opportunity search could be companies in many industries (and especially for every pharma and healthcare company, where I focus). This giant opportunity exists because there are still few websites that are actually optimized for search. What this means is that they aren't owing, or even showing up, for critical keywords. Nowhere is this more true than for major healthcare brands. Here's how Lipitor, the top-selling drug in the world, does for search. If you want all the details on the data in this table, click here. The numbers represent what position Lipitor.com shows up in search results for various keywords. A dash indicates that Lipitor.com is not in the top 500 results for the keyword (note: this was conducted in May).
Not a pretty picture. Okay, so forget about Google. Maybe there's a reason why companies aren't worried about Google. Of course, 80% of all online sessions begin with search and Google has a 63.7% share of all searches. That means that just over 50% of the time when someone starts... Read more
The 7 Golden Rules in Digital Relationship Marketing
This is part two of a series on relationship marketing. Please check out the first post, 7 Biggest Mistakes in Digital Relationship Marketing, and make sure you're not committing any of these before figuring out how to fix them. That post will also give you a bit more background on relationship marketing, but I'll include a brief overview here as well.
[PS: If you're looking for more on my take of how relationship marketing and pharma fit together, then check out my white paper on "The Future of Digital Relationship Marketing in Pharma." It's the most downloaded white paper on Dose of Digital.]
Here's our definition of relationship marketing (courtesy of our Chief Marketing Strategist, Bob Gilbreath):
"Relationship marketing is ongoing, direct, added-value communication."
Ongoing: It's a rhythm of regular, expected communication.
Direct: It doesn't mean buying media, but owning it: You have permission to communicate, and it can be done in many forms.
Added Value: The marketing itself fills a need; usually, the greater the value to the customer, the greater the ROI.
That last one is important: "fills a need." If you're not doing that, then you're probably just annoying your customers.
So, to ensure you're not doing this, I'm going to share with you what... Read more
The 7 Biggest Mistakes in Digital Relationship Marketing
For those of you who have heard me talk about my company, Bridge Worldwide, you know that I always say that we're a digital AND relationship marketing agency. We've always been the latter, going back to 1979 (and the former for almost that long). It's an important distinction to me. Digital agencies make a lot of cool stuff, but many lack the fundamental skills that are required to build lasting relationships with customers. Of course, we can make cool stuff too (and win the biggest awards in the process), but we pride ourselves on being able to deliver the relationship marketing piece.
So, with that, I thought I'd share what I know and have learned about relationship marketing from working with some talented people over the past few years and from the experience we've gathered from managing programs that now have more than 30 million total members. I should pause for a minute and, of course, mention that we think relationship marketing is evolving to something better called Marketing with Meaning. However, the basics of what makes relationship marketing REALLY work is embedded into Marketing with Meaning.
PS: If you're looking for more on my take of how relationship marketing and pharma... Read more
