How to use promotional items to grow your business

How to Use Promotional Items to Grow Your Small Business -- powered by eHow.com

See also:
Tradeshow give aways

Is Twitter destined to be the second bird to be killed by the same stone?

Remember the late 1990's when Web 1.0 was going crazy and website properties were spectacularly overvalued because they claimed to have “first mover advantage” and since they were dot-coms they could argue to investors that all they needed to do was build traffic first and then figure out how to monitize it to become profitable later? Remember those failed entrepreneurs who thought that simply building huge brand awareness was enough to ensure business success somewhere down the road?

In my initial days of getting to know Twitter I've found a tidbit on their website that made me fear that perhaps Twitter has forgotten the lessons of the past. In reading the About Twitter Q&A section I clicked on the link that asked, “How do you make money on Twitter?”, that is, how does Twitter itself make money?

The answer was startling.

It stated, in part, that “we are holding off on implementation [of generating revenue] for now because we don't want to distract ourselves from the more important work at hand...[w]hile our business model is in a research phase, we spend more money than we make.”

Uh oh. A business model that loses money and is in research phase after the product has launched sounds like an unsustainable business model to me.

As I've written previously, high brand awareness alone is nearly meaningless unless it comes along with strategic brand awareness that creates brand preference. Of course, this all assumes that a brand is profitable to begin with and that the strong brand preference leads to profitability and long term sustainability. Nobody is arguing that Twitter has not built a huge, passionate base of users who love the brand. What is arguable is whether or not that would have happened if it wasn't literally a free-for-all.

The first and foremost responsibility of business managers is to generate enough revenue to remain in operation. Organizations can aspire to wonderful, altruistic and admirable deeds and hope to develop the fanciest whiz bang technology but if they cannot find a way to remain in operation first then all of their efforts are for naught. Aspiration and hope are not business models.

Twitter is not alone on this one.

Other social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace are also building massive audiences with no sustaining revenue streams. What happens when users must pay some fee to use these services, pay for some of the content or if users must not only tolerate but embrace advertisements on these sites? If advertisers do not see profits from their ads, how will users feel if these Web 2.0 services compile and package information about users' preferences and behaviors and simply sell that information to companies who would like to target these people with their products and services? Creating a huge base of followers for a free service is relatively easy in the scheme of things. Getting somebody to pay for it all later after they've been accustomed to getting it for free usually upsets the apple cart.

Sure, Twitter and other social networking sites are great but who is going to pay for them? Sooner or later dollars are going to have to change hands to keep the servers plugged in and the lights turned on.

Can you envision a revenue stream that will be successful for Twitter? Would you pay to send your tweets? To read tweets? Would you willingly and purposefully transact business with advertisers on Twitter in order to keep the service running? Would you tolerate information about you being sold to third parties in order to generate revenue? Who owns your Twitter content? (Remember, Facebook recently had to do an abrupt about-face when they changed their terms of use to say they owned all content and reserved the right to do with it what they wished. Users revolted and the new policy was quickly changed.)

I'm eager to hear my followers' thoughts on this one. How does Twitter avoid a repeat of a Web 1.0 bubble burst?

Book review: Perspectives on Branding

Jason Miletsky and Genevieve Smith each separately answer 90 questions about branding in this work, Smith from the corporate side and Miletsky from the agency side. While the two have very different writing styles and experiences, the narrative weaves itself into a compelling book that comprehensively covers business branding as a topic.

Miletsky's style is less formal and a few times in the book he uses words and phrases that I don't ordinarily find in business books (or in polite company) while Smith is clearly more formal in her answers. Her responses are drawn almost, if not, entirely from her experience at Washington Mutual (annoyingly referred to as "WaMu" throughout the book) and his answers come from his experiences at his agency, PFS Marketwyse.

As I read each question I first thought about how I would answer the question and then compared that to how the authors responded. In all but a few cases I was satisfied with the responses that each author gave and was fascinated at times by the different perspectives. What perhaps was most refreshing was the interplay and how it affects the reader. You will find yourself thinking about the questions and the branding process and then you'll look for the nuggets of information to be gained from each author. There are plenty of nuggets to be had. The fact that you are thinking about the process means the book accomplishes what a good book is supposed to do.

This is a very good book that is easily digestible and is not pretentious in its approach toward the topic. It brings business branding to a level that is approachable by most any business manager and that in and of itself is quite a feat. I recommend this work.

Cast your net wide or narrow?

I could launch into a discussion about the pros and cons of marketing to niche or targeted markets vs. broad-based marketing but I won't. I'm just glad Woodie cares enough about us to offer sugar free fudge.

Happy Independence Day to my U.S. followers.