Just for fun, and thanks to Nat Polish, here is a follow-up to the Snuggie post I made the other day. Hope this one brightens a storm-swept US!

I'm being quite useful.  This thing is a Thneed.
A Thneed's a Fine-Something-That-All-People-Need!
It's a shirt.  It's a sock.  It's a glove.  It's a hat.
But it has OTHER uses.  Yes, far beyond that.
You can use it for carpets.  For pillows!  For sheets!
Or curtains!  Or covers for bicycle seats!"

-Words and illustration from The Lorax by Dr. Seuss.

There is a great NY Times Article today ("Snuggie Rode Silly Ads On Way Over Rivals to Stardom"). It matters because it illustrates so much about marketing. Turns out that the original product, The Slanket, is twice the quality and twice the cost, but is getting killed. And the originator of the idea is not happy about it.

Why did this happen? Because marketing matters. Yes, even in a recession, marketing that is accountable and measurable can sell things. Check out the Snuggie infomercial.

It's close to the Salad Shooter in uselessness, but there's a more important lesson. Parody videos have become the latest YouTube phenomenon, with millions of views, and the viral effect has led to sales of 4 million Snuggies. The conventional wisdom is that marketing in a recession is the way to gain market share. I believe this is true, but let's not forget that marketing has evolved into an more measurable and direct exercise with the expansion of the Internet. And now, the network effect makes the unmeasurable part immensely rewarding for all.

I asked a marketing colleague the other day if she uses Twitter, and she responded that she really didn’t have the time and besides, who’s interested in what she had for lunch?

I asked the wrong question, which should have been, “Do your customers use Twitter?" A  quick search showed that they do, and in the last few hours they had provided some interesting insights about her brand.

One conceptual stumbling block about Twitter is the “Why do people care what I’m doing every given second?” question, but that has two answers.  One is to stop thinking about Twitter in terms of you and what you are doing, but as mother lode of what other people are doing and thinking, starting at any point in time and moving back as long as Twitter has been saving their tweets.  If you aren’t sure what Twitter is, don’t start by tweeting your own comments, or even by following the tweets of any one person. Start at http://search.twitter.com and look up something about your industry, company or product. If it is a real timely topic, you’ll actually see the tweets scrolling by. Twitter also has links to trending topics, so you can see what lots of people are talking about right now.   You can do all this without even setting up a Twitter account. Once you understand how the search feature works, you can incorporate it into your standard marketing intelligence playbook, along with things like Google Alerts. One insightful marketer uses Twitter to develop personas that characterize their customers.   If you use an RSS reader, save your searches and check them periodically.

Of course, once you’ve passively used Twitter, you can get an account and start following people who you find during your searches that are contributing content that’s interesting or relevant to you. And, finally, you can start tweeting about things yourself, that roll up into the voice of the crowd. That's the second answer.

Who’s interested in what you had for lunch?  You’d be surprised.

Via a weekly email from Elance, I got a link to the following report: <http://www.elance.com/php/landing/main/ElanceSkillIndex.php>. (It pre-selected "Web & Programming" for me, but your mileage may vary.)

 

Elance is a marketplace for independent contractors and consulting agencies...not really like Clear Ink so much as the agencies down the line who will churn out production work. I find this data fascinating because it suggests how big the market is for a particular service and how many people there are serving it.  The numbers shown on this page are how many service providers there are. Clicking on the most of them will tell you how many open jobs there are. It looks like clicking on low demand skillsets return search results for providers.

For instance, for PHP I see 11,463 service providers and 1,906 open jobs. Logically, as a service provider, you'd want to be in an area with lots of open jobs and relatively low number of providers. As a buyer of services, you probably want to open jobs where there are the most number of service providers.

Of course there are complex issues to consider. Some of the technologies presented are subset of others. If you do ASP.NET, you probably also can do ASP. If you do Javascript, you certainly do DHTML and Ajax--even XHTML for that matter. Also, there is no distinction here between PHP 4 and PHP 5, but shops not experienced with PHP 5's object oriented features are probably comparable to shops who only do the old style of ASP. The most significant takeaway is that this report is not a recommendation to choose PHP because it's at the top of the list. Let's set aside the non-optimal breakout of the skills and look at the consumer to producer ratios.

I believe the numbers for Com are wrong. When I picked a developer on the list of "Com Experts", the skill wasn't listed. Since most of use have .com in our domains, I suspect Elance's search engine is making a mistake. Therefore, it looks like there's good opportunities for SEO, HTML, Flash, MySQL, Joomla and PHP. I'm somewhat surprised to see Joomla up there. My myopic view has been that Drupal is the darling of the CMS crowd.

If I put on my client hat, I might be encouraged to go with Drupal because there are 956 developers fighting over a measly 32 projects.

I also see that "Social Networking" is right in the middle of the list. That's great news for Clear Ink, or any agency looking to sell more of these types of leading edge services. As an agency aimed at leading clients with innovative techniques, you want to spend your time keeping yourselves at an expert level on the new trends and leave the commodity services (e.g. HTML) to partners.