By Jillian Anderson | September 15, 2009

Thanks for coming back! We'd really like to hear what you think of this post, so don't be shy with the comments!

A couple of months ago, Kyle wrote an excellent post highlighting 5 Reasons Not to Cut Your Marketing Budget in a Recession.  His points being:

• Your reputation can suffer.
• When times are tough, people look for deals.
• If you’re not moving forward, you’re moving backward.
• Marketing in a recession can give you a competitive advantage.
• Cut advertising, cut market share.

I want to take another look at the fourth point here, as marketing in a recession really does give you an advantage.  In truth, marketing ANY time gives you an advantage. But when the economy is down and a lot of businesses are cutting their marketing budgets, your dollars can go even further because there are fewer or weaker messages out there to compete with. …Read more »

By Ken | March 6, 2009

Have you seen it?  Youtube has opened up a fun little feature to its members.  It’s called Annotations.

Remember watching VH1 back around 1996-2000 when they had ‘Pop-up’ video?  It was the biggest thing going for a little while.  Basically, VH1 would take music videos from all genres and play them with fun little pop-up cartoon bubbles that showed funny little comments like trivia, wardrobe style comments (or lack thereof), and mocking the plot of the video.  It was always very entertaining, sort of like a music video ‘roast’.

In June of 2008, Youtube started playing with the idea of Annotation, based on the same concept as pop-up bubbles except these are INTERACTIVE (if you want).  Users who uploaded videos have the ability add pop-up bubbles or invisible ‘hot spots’ to their youtube videos on their youtube channel. Why is this a big deal?  It’s INTERACTIVE!  Users can create hotlinks from their video to other videos in their archive or elsewhere on Youtube. …Read more »

By Ken | January 20, 2009

The term ‘video’ once meant that my techy uncle Bernard was coming with his VHS recorder to ‘document’ my birthday…the world of video has exploded since those early days of watching “America’s Funniest Home Videos” on television, to millions of people uploading their videos to video sharing websites like Youtube.com.

This is where the true beauty of  modern technology comes in…people begin talking, sharing what they see with other users and the video spreads…like a virus, hence the term ‘viral marketing’.

…Read more »