Sacrilicious Marketing

Everybody is so caught up in the idea of blog to book deals, but really when you look at the Internet fame deals recently they have more in common than just blogging. They are mostly consumer centric, driven by the micro content phenomenon and appeal to the Gen X/Gen Y demographic. Now, let’s dissect that statement.

Top 10 Best Micro Content to Fame Deals

Recent Micro Content to Book/TV Deals

1.     Shitmydadsays (TV Deal)

2.     Fakeapstylebook (Book Deal)

3.     Fmylife (Book Deal)

4.     Texts From Last Night (TV Deal)

5.     F U Penguin (Book Deal)

6.     This is Why You’re Fat (Book Deal)

7.     Chuck Norris Facts (Book Deal)

8.     I Can Has Cheezburger (Book Deal)

9.     Stuff White People Like (Book Deal)

10.  Fail Blog (Book Deal)

Resource: Exploiting the Blog to Book Deal: A Guide

Resource: From Blog to Book, How 6 Authors Did It

1. Consumer Oriented

When you think of publishing fame do you think Seth Godin or JK Rowling? Seth has penned 12 best sellers but only sold 20 million copies, has an ad network/wiki called Squidoo and a social network called Triiibes. On the other hand, JK Rowling has penned a mere 7 bestsellers, sold over 400 million books and yet her fortune exceeds $798 million, ranking her the 12^th wealthiest woman on earth… The difference? Mr. Godin writes to marketing professionals, businesses and entrepreneurs while Ms. Rowling writes to a family friendly consumer audience of children and adults. What this should tell you unequivocally is that producing something you can market to the mass consumer market is more profitable than producing content you market to the business market.

Resource: Squidoo: Seth Godin’s Purple Albatross?

2. User Generated Content

The user generated model has really taken off within the micro content community with Fmylife and Textsfromlastnight. Each has successfully built a very robust and engaged community of commenter’s, voters and contributors. The product is simple. Hilarious situational humor coupled with a standardized format. The lesson? Find a universal situation or topic that all people can relate to and experience and open a micro forum where they can share their experience and interact with other similar experiences. The Fmyscript script can help you create just such a forum. It’s your responsibility to come up with the situation, the standardized format and populate the first few posts then spread the site among your inner circle. With any luck and good idea, it should go viral quickly.

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I think the music industry owes a big hand to the Lady that brought back superstardom in 2009! Lady Gaga gave one hell of a performance with Elton John at the 2010 Grammy’s. Just a wonderful celebration of music and celebrity.

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Facebook is an essential component of any business. When you consider that Papa John’s Facebook Strategy was directly responsible for improving sales by 28% in 2009, you start to recognize its power. For real estate, a business page is critical, but the fact is, most real estate professionals do not utilize the features and functionality of the page to the best of their ability. So, here is my definitive guide to building a successful real estate business page that does NOT require tons of your time. I like automation and conversion, so that’s what this guide will focus on. Building a page with features and content that are designed to impress visitors, create fans and push them back to your website and lead generators where they can convert to contacts, leads and clients.

About 6 months ago, I noticed that every Realtor on earth started a Facebook fan page and for some ungodly reason, every Realtor on earth with a fan page asked me to fan their page. Needless to say, I didn’t. Why you ask? Because their pages were just lame and irrelevant to me. Then came Kevin Tomlinson… Kevin wanted a fan page that rocked the web. Now, Kevin is no slouch when it comes to content creation or hiring the best people to do the right job so, of course he came to Dakno and Sacrilicous. Together with Kevin’s already rockin’ fan page content Brad and I added listing search and welcome tabs through the FBML application. The secret sauce is creating a call to action welcome page and a Listing Search page then supplementing the functionality with applications like LinkedIn, Realtor.com’s MyListings and Slideshare. Creating a multimedia experience along with the delivery of quality content all within an interactive user experience.is the key to creating the most valuable experience possible for visitors. Here are 5 Tips that will help you build one of your own.

Become a Fan of Real Estate Fan Pages on Facebook and get updated news and tips on how to make your fan page more valuable.

1.    The custom welcome page and/or custom IDX search page

Landing on a Facebook wall is just boring. It is a wall of information that really doesn’t give people the full picture of your real estate business. And let’s face it, most of the real estate content there is somewhat boring, so create a custom Welcome page that uses proven conversion psychology to call visitors to action to fan your page and push over to your website and lead generators. Make sure you include a brief bio, all your contact information and call to actions to your lead generation tools like property search, market reports, contact form and even community profiles. Resources for buyers and sellers would also be helpful.

Examples: Samantha Nichols Thomas Druck Kevin Tomlinson Leigh Brown Sotheby’s Sam Miller Castles Magazine George Tallabas Carl Martens Lee Taylor John MacArthur Missy Caulk Janis Gigliardi Ken Jansen

Bonus Tips: Be sure to use the FBML application to customize your landing page and set the new page as your default landing page for new visitors. Also, remember that calls to action that push visitors back over to your website are the most crucial thing you can include on a custom welcome page!

So far Sacrilicious has been successful at integrating Tiger Lead, Wolfnet, 1parkplace, Z57 and HomeFider IDXs, but challenge us with yours and we will do our best!

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1009 Lessons Learned: How to Attract the Clients You Want & How to Do The Work You Love

I learned a lot in 2009. But my greatest lesson was how to have the business I WANT not the business I NEED. I have a stone on my desk that reads “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” It basically sums up my philosophy on business. I’m not big on the law of attraction because I am a cynic at heart, however, I do believe in planning and that good planning attracts you the kind of business you want. Now, while I do have a full time gig in the music industry at a major label, I also have a successful side consulting business I built over the past 2 years. Initially, Sacrilicious was meant as something to provide me with some immediate income at a time when I had lost my position in a company I had founded due to divorce. But, over time, it became something I had never anticipated, an honest to goodness business and more importantly, a business I liked working for! Is my consulting business huge? No. Does it pay my bills and then some so I can put my paychecks from my day job away towards my future, yes. Why am I sharing this? Because there is more than enough consulting business to go around and I’m tired of reading posts from very talented and bright people that are suffering and blaming a bad economy for bad planning on their part.  So, while I cannot not directly help them I can offer some advice and planning that helped me.

I determined 2 years ago that if I was going to have a consulting business, I wanted 2 things:

1. To love my work

2. To love my clients

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About 6 months ago, Seth Semilof, the publisher of Haute Living Magazine contacted me through my good friend and client, Kevin Tomlinson. Seth, who has long had a very successful magazine for the elite, Haute Living, wanted to create a premier luxury living online property. His idea was brilliant, he wanted to call upon his rich and famous friends like fashion designer, Catherine Malandrino and Denise Rich (infamous philanthropist and Grammy nominated songwriter for Celine Dion, Mary J. Blige, Diana Ross and Mandy Moore) to provide personal city guides of Miami, New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles with recommendations of where to eat, drink, get pampered and stay when visiting. The idea was to create a network of luxury information from exclusive bloggers and the printed magazine content and couple it with premium level city guide content to drive the largest luxury living online network. Launched earlier this year, the site www.hauteliving.com has catapulted itself through a strategic SEO campaign and content building program to the top 50K of all US website traffic and built a very involved and loyal readership. The launch of the Haute Secrets, component earlier this month and the collective clout of the rich and famous names associated with it have further built the websites reputation and buzz and has helped to grow the sites traffic by more than 210% in the past 3 months.

Feel free to check out the Haute Secrets Guides in your city here and find out where Sir Richard Branson dines and Katherine Malandrino goes to get pretty…

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EMI, Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and Sony pull YouTube’s Teeth Out by Deindexing Their Video Content and Placing it on Their Own Proprietary Networks, Hulu and Vevo.

As music labels, film studios, newspapers and other traditional publishers struggle to survive in the ever changing landscape of the Internet and it’s “free content” model, 2009 ushered in the world wide war against free content. Most pundits initially looked upon Ruppert Murdoch’s “Crazy Eddie” strategy of de-indexing all News Corporation content, including both the New York Times and The New York Post as a bullying tax collector strategy of old that would not suit the new media model. But, as it turns out, it worked! That content has value. Google and Bing wanted it badly enough to pay for it. And over the past few months, as the model has shown increasing promise, most major publishing houses including those in film, television and music have taken note and found ways to work similar deals. While Sony, Universal and EMI have launched Vevo a video music network with the help of their YouTube/Google partnership, Warner Music Group joined it’s mother company, Warner Bros in the long list of music, film and television companies embarking on deals with Hulu. The end game solution for publishers is to de-index their existing video and textual content from major hubs including search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing and YouTube, publish it exclusively on their own networks and charge the engines for access to index that content and push traffic back to their own networks. The value for the publishing houses is that now they have a central and controlled domain where they can aggregate all their copyrighted content. This means that publishers are now generating income for the indexation of content and pushing traffic in bulk back to their proprietary sites where they can sell advertising. It allows they greater control over their copyright information and, overtime, will help them to build large scale branded networks to feature their data on. Essentially, these publishers are building their own on demand TV, Radio and News networks where they not only generate revenue from advertising but also from the indexing of their content. This should be both a boon for publishers and content producers.

Resource: Hulu Tops 1 Billion Streams per Month!

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When it’s simply not enough to release a raunchy sex tape, try becoming a true Twitter Whore and selling out for 10,000 per tweet to advertisers like Bumpit and Shoedazzle. So, not only does this girl act like a shameless whore in real life selling out her family to reality TV, her body to Golden Shower Sex Tapes but now, even her Twitter page to sponsored tweets. What concerns me most is that she is clearly skirting the FTC laws that require bloggers to clearly label sponsored posts and endorsements.

Personally, I really can’t respect any advertiser that thinks the credibility and trust value of someone like Kim Kardashian warrants $10K per tweet.

Resource: Twitter stunned Kim Kardashian earns $10k a tweet

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So, Paul Chaney and I were having a discussion about, well, everything and then we started talking about social media pet peeves and things you can and can’t do and we discovered there are no hard fast rules or absolutes, it’s all in the way you do things that separate the fail from the un-fail. So, in honor of our conversation, we are starting an AA meeting meme for recovering social media purists. So, here goes…

The first step in any recovery program is to admit you have a problem…

All The Twucked Up Twit in Social Media!

My Name is Mary and I am a Social Media Purist. It all began when I created my first Twitter account. It started off slowly by just broadcasting some blog posts then I started interacting with my friends, next I knew I was engaging with everyone and anyone, retweeting posts in my stream like a crack head on a bender and even getting snarky with the industry insiders on the “conversation proposition.” I became an “engagement junkie.” It was bad… I was the first to shout from the rooftops how Twitter was all about engagement and conversation and if you had a brand or were building one you MUST interact. I poo pooed on “broadcast only” accounts saying there was no place for them and how they “missed the boat.” I’m not gonna lie, I’d hit rock bottom. I was basically mainlining the industry jargon and social media propaganda…

But then, it happened… I found no engagement accounts that worked. They served a purpose, created a follower base and converted followers to leads, referrers and even sales effectively. They were gems among the coal mines of accounts, they were shining little points of light that made me rethink the whole idea of broadcast only accounts.

So what makes a successful broadcast only Twitter account? Most the successful broadcast only accounts have a proven format for tweets they stick to – see Fmylife. They provide humor, news, tutorials, tips, quotes, etc. They serve to collect large user bases and seek to drive traffic either back to their site for conversion there or build enough social equity and content to entice publishers to offer them book or editorial deals. These types of accounts have reformed my perception of broadcasting instead of socializing on Twitter. They have helped me to understand that there are no absolutes when using Twitter. If you have a goal and a strategy, you can bend Twitter to your will and do what others say cannot be done or should not be done. But, here’s the clincher, if you are going to go against the glut of social media “gurus” and use a broadcast only account, you just have to do it well. You have to offer something valuable in the content and push your visitors to a place where they can convert to customers. Below are a few broadcast only accounts that do it very very well that helped me realize I needed a 12 step social media program to cure my purist thought ways!

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How to build a brand online with social networks

There is a school of thought on the Internet that says if you want to build a community for yourself –go out and find the fringers and give them a place to connect to you and each other through your brand. Find the outcasts and unite them. I say NO! No. It’s simple. The popular kids never give tutorials on how to become popular. And they never go out and sit down at the loser nose pickers lunch table and make them their tribe. If you want to be a prom king brand or product on the internet you need to build your clique from the top down with two distinct types of users.

Read also: You Are Not My Friend: Why consumers only want to hang with the prom king

1. The celebrities/influencers

These are people that everybody already knows and respepcts. These are celebrities’ in their industry. The household names. They have the ability by simply mentioning your product/brand/website once in a blog post or using it to influence a large number of people.

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Have a cold blooded Christmas

And Merry Christmas, Bitch! A special gift for Christmas Bitches.

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