Posts Tagged ‘GoDaddy.com’
When I view the home page on Twitter I always take a peek at what topics are ‘trending’. It’s often the quickest way to find out what people are talking about. Of course what people talk about can be amazingly trivial and uninteresting.
Take a look. Right now I just peeked and saw Chad Pennington (a Quarterback for the Miami Dolphins), apparently tore his ACL playing off-season basketball. One comment on the oft-injured QB was that even without football he can find a way to put himself on injured reserve. Earlier this week there was a trending topic ‘RIP Jackie Chan’. I took a quick scroll down the list and many people were aghast that the news (totally untrue) was shocking but most people did not believe it.
GoDaddy’s CEO Bob Parsons was also a trending topic today – he posted a video of he and some team members on safari in Africa shooting and killing an elephant, the elephant was alleged to have been trampling a sorghum field thus impoverishing local farmers and causing starvation. This will no doubt be all over the news in the next few days with people calling for boycotts of GoDaddy.com.
What makes a trending topic? Obviously the things that people are tweeting about. And (by some counts) with more than 100 million Twitter users that’s a pretty large sample (granted most users actually tweet rarely). So what makes a trending topic is having a substantial number of people Tweet about something that they find interesting and want their followers to see. You can select trending topics to be segmented by country, or even by city. Take a look at what’s trending in Brazil or Turkey for example.
Not all of the trending topics are trivial however. I first saw the news of the tsunami in Japan as a trending topic on Twitter. I immediately searched for more news. The speed at which people tweet an event is mind-boggling at times. I can’t imagine being that plugged into everything that is going on that I would be able to (or want to) be an early tweeter of what will be a trending event.
At the same time trending topics on Twitter do act as a representation of some collective consciousness of what people are thinking about. I find that very interesting and I am betting it will get even more interesting as more people jump into the Tweetstream.
Non-social media users like to make fun of Twitter and readily admit that they don’t get it, and don’t have time for what they consider to be nonsense. As a marketing guy I find the maturation of Twitter and Twitterites (it would be good to settle on one name for those that Tweet I admit) to be a good study of the way human beings interact as well as how communications are evolving.
And I am somewhat relieved but sad to learn that they caught the missing Bronx Zoo Cobra – who which by the way has more than 200,000 followers. And many of the tweets from the @bronxzoocobra were both clever and hilarious. It’s good to laugh at work sometimes.
It happens more often than one would have imagined. A prospect or friend who knows what our agency does will tell me that they either need a redesign of their old website or even develop their company’s first website. And can we help them?
While the answer is unequivocally yes – we CAN help, what has really happened is the opening of a dialog on their entire marketing effort. This is frequently much more than the prospect or friend has bargained for. Yet we feel we are doing a disservice to anyone by simply nodding and saying ‘Sure we’ll do a website for you’, without knowing much (or enough) about their business, its focus and challenges.
Keep in mind that in order for our agency to do a really good job on a website, a substantial amount of intelligence has to be gained in order to understand the objective and create an interesting, cool, and highly intuitive website. Smaller businesses frequently have more budget restrictions than larger ones and that’s no surprise. But whether the business is small or large, having a website is important but it may not be the most important marketing activity their business needs to move forward.
Our digital and direct marketing agency is not looking to compete with the GoDaddy.com website model. If inexpensive is what the mission is, then sites like GoDaddy (there are others) can provide template solutions that enable the user to plug in content (photos, text, links) and get a web presence all with hosting for $ 1,000 or less. True you will not benefit from our agency’s (or any agency’s) years of experience in usability and creative design, but if spending as little money as possible is needed, then do the work yourself and you will have a web ‘presence’.
What those template solutions will also not do is ask you questions about the business and its direction. We have had clients ask us about creating a new website and ended up not only doing that and we end up helping their business market its services in many other ways. Other times we may not revamp the website as a primary strategy.
One of our team members likened an inquiry about a new website is often a marketing cry for help. I think that is true in many cases. What we can uncover during our discovery process in developing a new or updating and old website is at times surprising to everyone – client and agency. Once we get to that point the real work can begin and what results is a better engagement and better result for the client.
We’re in business to give our clients all that they ask for and more. Sometimes that can be more than they want or even need. But the questions always have to be asked to determine what we feel is the best marketing path for the client. It might be a new website and then again it might not.
Do you think I am off base here?
Already the Tim Tebow anti-abortion ad has gotten the pre-game buzz. Will it hurt his future prospects as a pitchman? I highly doubt it. Go Daddy.com will feature Danica Patrick once again (fully clothed in case you are wondering). Bridgestone will have an entry as well Volkswagen. All spots for the game are ‘sold-out’ as of February 1st. It escapes me how spending $ 2,500,000 for a 30 second spot can possibly have a positive ROI. Oh that’s right it’s branding so we need to lengthen the curve.
The game will draw 100,000,000 plus viewers. In the last 20 years, Anheuser-Busch has spent more than $300 million on Super Bowl commercials, Pepsi $254 million and GM just over $80 million, according to TNS. What really surprised me is that the Pro Bowl played Sunday night had its best viewership since 2000 drawing 12.3 million viewers. A game that the players don’t want to play in – you would think people would have something (anything!) better to do. The Grammy’s drew twice the viewership and was an infinitely better show (I am guessing since I watched the Grammy’s and did not watch a minute of the Pro Bowl).
And what of the game itself this coming Sunday? Kickoff at 6:40PM and The Who performing at halftime. But little is noted about the game itself. The New Orleans Saints have an opportunity to both win their first Super Bowl and continue to help resurrect a fallen city. The Indianapolis Colts led by 4-time Most Valuable Player Peyton Manning are hoping to validate a decision to give up the pursuit of a perfect season. Only a Super Bowl win will accomplish that.
For me – it’s about the food (chicken wings and chili) and drinks. Our family and friends spend time together many of whom watch normally no more than half the game, (although in recent years the games have been really good).
So I like both the ads and the game but as a sports enthusiast I prefer the game. How about you?