In last week’s post, A Welcome Audit During Tax Season: How to Evaluate Your Marketing Tactics we discussed the first step in making sure you are taking maximum advantage of your online opportunities.  Coming out of this first step you should now have a sense of everything you are doing online, your strengths and potential areas for improvement.  And hopefully you have now put this together into your interactive marketing plan.

This week, we’ll cover Step 2, which focuses on implementing that plan, and in particular,  the places where things most often go wrong.  And, just for fun, let’s number them out McLaughlin Group (I’ll let you do the McLaughlin voice)

Issue Number 1: The Plan Isn’t Right, or There’s No Plan at All

OK, counting this as one isn’t entirely fair.   If you read and followed our Step 1, evaluated everything properly, and created an Interactive Marketing plan that integrates with your overall marketing plan then you should be in good shape.  But in our experience, this is the most common place where things go wrong – right out of the gates –  So I had to put it right at the top of the list.

The ways to fix this are clearly outlined in my last post, so I won’t repeat here.

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“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”

I’m not sure when Warren Buffet uttered those words, or in what context, but I have every reason to listen to and embrace that type of thinking.

Chris Brogan is no Warren Buffet, but he is no stranger to building businesses and personal celebrity. He set the marketing world on fire yesterday when he published his daily rate – the rate a business pays (or at least is asked to pay) to occupy his full attention span for a day. The rate is around $22,000. For those of you who haven’t seen that number previously, insert your yikes, holy s%^&, and no ways here.

That’s more than Barack Obama earns on a daily basis to address issues far more important than marketing strategy. That’s 1.5 times what Kevin Durant, the NBA’s second-leading scorer, makes on a daily basis.

I love the fact that Brogan published it. He clearly thinks – and more importantly his paying clients think – that his contribution in a day is worth $22,000 or more.

Particularly in the marketing world, we see too much of the opposite these days. Within the next 5 minutes, I can likely find a $500 website offering, or a $49/month consulting package, or someone offering a $15 hourly rate on high quality copywriting. It’s ugly, and whether marketing folks like to admit it or not, it has a negative impact on all of us.

Just today, we had to make 2 or 3 tough pricing decisions in our business. Fortunately, we have a pretty simple set of questions we ask ourselves when we’re trying to determine pricing.

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Earlier this week, the Pew Research Center released their most recent study Understanding the Participatory News Consumer, which contained quite a few interesting nuggets for marketers.

First, the Internet now has surpassed newspapers and radio to become the third most popular news platform in the U.S.  According to Pew:

The internet and mobile technologies are at the center of the story of how people’s relationship to news is changing. In today’s new multi-platform media environment, news is becoming portable, personalized, and participatory:

• Portable: 33% of cell phone owners now access news on their cell phones.
• Personalized: 28% of internet users have customized their home page to include news from sources and on topics that particularly interest them.
• Participatory: 37% of internet users have contributed to the creation of news, commented about it, or disseminated it via postings on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter.

Now for some of us, this research data didn’t really tell you anything new, just put out some numbers confirming existing suspicions.  After all, we live in a world where Google’s Market Cap exceeds that of the venerable GE .  And yet, we see everyday that many companies still aren’t placing enough value on their online marketing presence.

Typically, this isn’t by intentionally avoiding the online side, but because, as one client often expresses it to me “We don’t know what we don’t know.”  With that in mind, here’s the first of a couple posts on how to make sure you are taking maximum advantage of your online opportunities.

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