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Will it blend?

Guest post by: Keith Thirgood

Article Overview: Have you seen that wild page on YouTube for the kitchen blender from BlendTec? More than 25 million people have visited that YouTube page to watch their blending antics. Over 3 million references to it are now on the web, not to mention that the question “Will it blend?� has become a household phrase. All from a small company out of Utah.

Will it blend?

Have you seen that wild page on YouTube for the kitchen blender from BlendTec? More than 25 million people have visited that YouTube page to watch their blending antics. Over 3 million references to it are now on the web, not to mention that the question “Will it blend?” has become a household phrase. All from a small company out of Utah.

YouTube , MySpace , FaceBook , Flickr , LinkedIn , Plaxo . These websites aren’t just kid stuff anymore. Depending upon your business, these social networking sites can play an important role in helping you start up, maintain and build your business.

However, they’re also not a revolution, overturning all marketing tools, techniques and wisdom from the past, despite what some gurus try to pitch. Think of them as new tools, which can be used and abused in the search for new customers.

LinkedIn is one of the easiest in which to see business value. It’s completely business-oriented. We used it recently, looking for information for one of our clients on how to self-publish a book. We asked a couple of our LinkedIn contacts if they had any insight into self-publishing. We got responses from them, and another fifteen people who are in other people’s sphere of influence. All these people shared their personal experiences with a variety of sources, gave us pointers to more in-depth information and in two days we were provided with more information than we could have researched in a month.

We’ve seen other LinkedIn subscribers use it to look for contractors, employees, services and other business issues. It’s clear they get results.

We’ve reconnected with old clients and colleagues from as far back as 30 years. Connections not to be underestimated.

Plaxo takes a different approach. As a free subscriber, when you update your address book anyone else who is a subscriber is updated as well. We’re all salespeople whether we like it or not, and anything that makes it easier to stay up-to-date and in touch is a good thing. It’s an automated contact management system and stress reducer all rolled in one.

At first glance, MySpace and YouTube look like they’re just fun places to visit. However, there are business and entrepreneur forums, blogs, groups and more. It’s a great place to widen your audience if you are in the entertainment industry (or can be entertaining). As “Will It Blend?” proved with their YouTube space, clever businesses, no matter what their field, can find ways to make this a marketing tool.

FaceBook, originally a Harvard campus tool, now has over 350 million active users, and allows users to post free classified ads for among other things, jobs wanted or jobs available. Used as an element of a multi-media campaign, FaceBook has the power to put a engaging personality to an otherwise abstract concept.

Flickr is a photo sharing website (more than 4 billion images and counting). It’s not just about popping in photos, but getting creative and getting known. In their Share Area, they say “Groups are a way for people to come together around a common interest, be it a love for dogs or a passion for food…”. If that isn’t target marketing…

Twitter is really a microblog, an instant messager. Each message is limited to 140 characters including your contact information. Prominent twitter users like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (yes!) use it to keep their supporters informed on their latest appearances. If you have a wide group of people with whom it is important to keep in touch, Twitter is a free tool to help you stay on top.

These sites aren’t a passing fad, and they’re not just for kids. Of the top ten most popular sites on the internet, five are social networking sites: YouTube, MySpace, FaceBook, hi5 and Orkut. The other five? Search engines.

Just a note, last week Helen’s beloved 30-year old blender died. While we didn’t buy a BlendTek blender (we couldn’t afford one) we could not help but ask, with every blender we looked at, Will it blend?

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Article Tags: kitchen blender, marketing, out of the box thinking, viral campaign, youtube



Related Forum Posts
Interesting! - I've never heard of Second Life before this, and it sounds really neat! I like the idea of it, though, and I'm going to look into it. As a huge fan of video games, and MMO's, it sounds like a perfect blend. ~Marie
Re: Interesting! - [quote="NewmanWrites":ysnewmpk]I've never heard of Second Life before this, and it sounds really neat! I like the idea of it, though, and I'm going to look into it. As a huge fan of video games, and MMO's, it sounds like a perfect blend. ~Marie[/quote:ysnewmpk] Never heard of it either. Gonna go visit the site right now!
Re: how do I get started with Wordpress blog? - bump.. I agree with the comments made by christew. Self-hosted (your domain and a downloaded copy of Wordpress from wordpress.org) is best for the serious business owner looking to build a presence online using a blogging platform. I usually use wordpress to create a blend of Static pages (to look like a traditional website) and have a blog component where new content is posted atleast once a week for my clients. Wordpress is very user friendly and has a very shallow learning curve if you are only adding content to it. If you are looking to add functionality (aka plugins) the learning curve is not bad even for someone starting off but sometimes you may need the functionality to look and behave slightly different than "out-of-the-box" and you may need some knowledge of HTML.


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