Don’t ever let it be said that bad reviews have no value in marketing your business or nonprofit. It’s a given, when things go wrong businesses can use the momentum from the disaster to motivate employees and speed up critical development. If your on top of this critical thinking you can jump start the motivation even before an analysis of the problem has commenced.

But using disaster to create a marketing campaign might seem like an idea that better resides in outer space. Think what your peers would say if you suddenly showed up on TV or the Web telling your customers you’d dropped the ball and your products are not what they should be. You can just imagine the scene outside your headquarters when the shareholders show up waving torches and brandishing pitchforks yelling for blood. Maybe the best way is to create the campaign around the missteps at the same time you introduce the solution.

Domino’s has done just that, they have created a campaign entitled Pizza Turnaround creating a website and producing a video that celebrates their new pizza while openly showing people who hated the old product. It’s not a new idea Domino’s is using to market themselves, but they do it brilliantly.

Did I call and try one of their new pizzas? You bet I did, and while the real test is will the pizza taste good when I order it 6 months down the road, the one I got the other night was very good and a huge improvement over the last few experiences with this brand. When I think of ordering a pizza for delivery Domino’s is back in the mix because of the taste of their product but without the marketing campaign I would never have called them. Bravo!

2010 is shaping up to be a banner year for innovation, and everyone is telling us to look forward to new opportunities in the New Year but few are pointing to concrete examples of those opportunities.

The NTY today ran another story (Adding Fees and Fences) about the growing call from large media producers for pay-as-you-go content sites, these sites will charge a fixed or ala-carte amount for their newly designated premium media content. The usual suspects are falling in behind Rupert Murdoch’s crotchety dark-age leadership with cries that they are being ripped off.

One can’t help but remember the last decade of these same shouts from the likes of the RIAA, and even today the NYT dragged out the dinosaur argument that file swapping was the primary culprit that killed the music industry’s golden egg (shame on your NYT). Murdoch and his greed infested followers are opening the door for all small businesses and organizations to create new and exciting collaborations that will help to quickly fill this void and further send these fossils into the grave.

What this is really about is not what they would have you believe. News Corp and the other relics are struggling to hold on to power, the power to control content from start to finish and they stay awake at night worrying about competition. The titans like Murdoch are really monopolists who talk about the benefits of capitalism and competition while all the while doing there best to stifle it. There is nothing fair or balanced in an economic system that rewards those who practice the craft of monopoly while at the same time punishes innovators and entrepreneurs.

Small business and nonprofits can benefit mightily from the dinosaurs walling themselves off. Small business entrepreneurs can take the lead in creating alliances that create content and products, getting them to market faster and cheaper then the old guard could ever hope to. The water in the kettle is about to boil sounding the call to innovation and over the next couple of months I will share some collaboration ideas to help make these behemoths obsolete.

It was no surprise over the last couple of weeks to see stories from the news media about how adults are using Twitter more then young people. Articles like the one in the NYT today Adults Have Fueled Twitter lay out the details to the new surveys and will go further into it on Wednesday.

In the coming days and weeks the statistics will continue to dribble out, and a picture will be painted of the why. Why adults have adopted Twitter seems like a no-brainier  to me. Twitter offers an opportunity to share ideas and news about your  business and life without having to pay the high maintenance costs that other Social Media sites charge. It is a safe assumption to make that adults have significantly less time to spend in the online world and would love to be part of it, love to tap in to its potential without having to spend hours and hours every week pruning and fertilizing their online presence.

Nielsen has the definitive charts and graphs showing how 84% of Twitter’s users are over 25, check it out when you get a second. And if you are not integrating your business or personal web presence with Twitter by now, why not? Search engine optimization and marketing are much more then just making sure your title tag and keywords get you noticed, SEO/SEM are an ongoing active endeavor and Twitter should be part of your daily tactics.

This all reminds me, I haven’t Twittered yet today…… Have you?

Cheeseburger Cupcakes

Originally uploaded by KateDW

I found this gem of a promotion idea on Flickr and want to share it with everyone. Check out all the pictures she added showing how these were created. Using creativity and coming up with an idea like this will have people talking about your business and you for a long time.

@RT is popping up everywhere on Twitter but some people are confused as to its possible commerical or social value. Question like “what do I Re-Tweet” or “what time should I Re-Tweet” abound in emails and forums around the web. Well to the rescue is Dan Zarrella, he has put together an information packed slide show on just this subject. The slide show is titled How To Get Re Tweeted? You can watch it below, I do suggest watching it full screen. Enjoy!

The NYT has an interesting article today about one blogger who reviews baby products as part of her blog. The article is titled “When a Blogger Voices Approval, a Sponsor May Be Lurking,” Yes that is a mouthful and the article gives bloggers a lot to chew on.

The fine line between reviews for free and reviews for money can be almost invisible, there are companies looking to entice you into giving them a positive post for which they will pay you. Note I said positive post, I didn’t say unbiased or even handed. Sometimes getting paid is contingent on saying things you either don’t believe or only half believe. What’s a blogger to do if they want to keep their integrity intact?

The answer may not come as a surprise but it bears repeating, Practice transparency with your readers, give them all the information about your testing criteria, and radically lay out any and all  (even casual) relationships you have with business and organizations involved with products or services in your reviews. Practicing radical transparency allows you to off-load any worries about your impartial integrity or questions about your motives.

I’m sure many people wish organizations such as Commercial Alert would go away. With The Internet, groups watching your business will only continue to spring up, practicing radical transparency will inoculate you and your business from scrutiny.

Finding followers on Twitter is not a hard thing to do, however it can be daunting to find followers who are motivated and interested in what you are Tweeting about. I came across a new advertising site that puts a banner with your twitter profile on web sites that develops apps or are some how connected with the twitter community.

At Featured Users you can get started for just 10.00, this will get you 1000 impressions. I just signed up and will pass on my results in the near future. To the left is an example of how the ad might look on a web site.  It also might show up in a long banner depending on how each site is set up to receive the ads.

The advertising company gives you access to statistics of impressions and of click through numbers. You will notice that at the bottom of the ad it has a location. Featured Users tries to serve up most of your ads using the GEO location of your Twitter Profile, this could be a real benefit for many bloggers and businesses.

UPDATE:   Seems the results are in the -2% for click through, now this may not be a bad number but you do want to make sure that the people clicking at that rate are motivated or interested in your product or service. Make sure what your offer coincides with the the blog you are advertising on. Hint:  people on a tech blog may not have a huge interest in reading your fiction pieces.

Successfully using Online or Offline Marketing requires that you Stand On Your Head from time to time. What I mean by that is, using thinking to set you apart from everyone else. When we walk into a meeting with a black arm band everyone notices. The black arm band will mean something different to each person in the room depending on how their world is constructed, but everyone will notice it and notice that you are the one wearing it. No one else is wearing it, just you, Your noticed and associated for a brief time with wearing a black arm band.

I’m attaching a movie about a high speed camera that is capturing visuals never before captured with a camera. This last statement is theirs not mine, I have no independent confirmation that it is true but it got me to watch the video. These people are presenting something new to most of us and they are standing out from all those around them. Standing On Your Head once in a while will get the blood to flow there more often.

I put up the Promotional Pancakes web site over the weekend and started adding some content (back story) to the site.  I will finish adding new content to the site over the next 10 days and at the same time will start on a link building campaign.

Why? That is a question I have gotten a few times over the the weekend and my answer is simple, I want to build a web site for a service company ( in this case marketing) and get some ranking for it within Search. The 2nd reason is to use this site as an example of my view that, if you as a small business owner pay attention to your core business and chronicle that business on the web you will do well on the web, meaning you will garner traffic and calls to your business.

Of course this is only a piece of the marketing equation but it is one I think is really important. Too many small businesses waste  their time and money trying to redesign the way they do things in order to fit into the web. I’m a big believer that chronicling your business on the web creates unique content that in turn will drive traffic.

Seth Godin’s three U’s, Useful, Unique and Updated fits into almost every business who wants new customers. The three U’s is a simple plan of content chronicling that every business would be wise to follow and a path that I am a zealous adherent to.

Do What You Do, and then chronicle it on the web using text and media, you will create value within your niche.