Last week I had the opportunity to interview Tony Zito, the CEO for mediaFORGE, a company that “has widgets comin’ out their ads.” More to the point, mediaFORGE creates widgets as a new means of display advertising. What that means is they don’t do online advertising the way most people do. Don’t ask them to create a banner ad for you. They won’t do it. They’ll give you a widget instead…and you’ll be glad they did. According to Zito, their widgets perform with a conversion rate that’s three to five times higher than standard banner ads. You can see some of their widgets on their showcase page.

Think about that conversion rate over standard banner ads…three to five times more conversions. So if you’re getting a 3% conversion rate now, you could be getting 9% or even a 15% conversion rate by simply ditching the ads that people don’t like anyway for something they’ll engage and act on. Zito thinks this is the next phase of display ads. I happen to agree. We know banner ads don’t work. Even stats from four years ago show they haven’t been working for a while.

Widgets seemed to really take off last year as more marketers looked to them for sales and promotions. According to Zito, “last year was the year of the widget, but this year is the year of ‘how do we monetize the widget?’” For all the interest marketers are showing for new media marketing opportunities, the inevitable question is: “Ok, now what? When does this start making money for us?” That’s a question that all social media marketers are dealing with and one that mediaFORGE seems to be providing an answer for.

What I’ve personally be perplexed by for a while now is that if not banner ads, what do you recommend for mere display ad purposes? I think Zito and mediaFORGE are going down the right road. The widgets provide something that has value to the customer or prospect. It allows a person to engage an ad rather than simply being interrupted. I don’t know for sure if widgets are the next wave of display ads, but it sure seems like it’s going the right direction.

If you have a blog I hope you see it as a strategic marketing tool for your business or organization because it is. One thing you should be doing is blogging specific keywords and phrases that describe you and your business, products, or services. If you have a Google AdWord account you have already identified the keywords you want to be recognized for, so why not use those same keywords straegically in your blog post titles and throughout the posts themselves?

The stats I continue to see pop up after doing a little research suggest that 70% of online searchers prefer natural search results compared to paid search results like AdWords. That’s why it’s important to be found on the left-hand side of the Google search page more than the right-hand side. You get more than twice the traffic.

Here’s how it can work…

Let’s say I want to be discovered as a new media marketing or social media marketing expert in the Nashville area (which would be nice but I personally don’t want to be too geographically fixed so I wouldn’t necessarily use these specific combinations of keywords). I would probably do a steady stream of posts over the course of several months where I would use the words “social media” or “new media” and “Nashville” in the post titles and through the blog posts themselves. I would also look for variations on these keywords like “social media marketing” and “middle Tennessee” or “new media marketing” and “Nashville-area.” I could even get more specific with phrases like “social media consulting” or “new media coaching” and then also tie that into the Nashville or middle Tennessee keywords.

As you can see there’s a lot that can be done here and it’s just the beginning. There are all kinds of alternative phrases I haven’t even gotten into like digital marketing, online advertising, interactive media, interactive marketing, etc. I expect if you just took 15 minutes to focus on the keywords for your business you would come up with a nice, long list too. Once you get your list, identify the top ten most important ones so you know where to put the bulk of your energy.

One more thing to do is to really focusing on tagging your posts with the same keywords as you’ll see I’ve done below with the same keywords that you use in your posts. Jeff, over at Mossy Creek Custom saw a great increase in traffic to his blog once he started tagging more specifically.

After a few weeks start searching the keywords to see if your posts are turning up. Also, check your stats and see if there are some specific keywords that seem to be sending a lot of people to your blog. You may be surprised

So, to recap, here are four things to do:

1. Identify your keywords. If you haven’t identified your keywords with a Google AdWords account, take some time to create a list of all the phrases you would hope to be found under in a Google search. After this, pick out the top 10 that are most important and start with those.
2. Post strategically and regularly. If you post four times a week, maybe one of the four posts every week will be a strategic post with your selected keywords. You should plan to do this for a few months to get good coverage because it may take that long before you see it show up on Google depending on how competitive your particluar market is.
3. Tag you posts. Tag well. Tag often. Tag like you marketing life depends on it…ok, not that much, but you get the idea.
4. Measure. Check to see what’s working and what isn’t. You may have some surprisingly high performing keywords that you didn’t expect. If so, you should consider blogging about them more often.

I saw this morning that Target has responded to a recent request from a blogger about an advertisement complaint by saying: “Unfortunately we are unable to respond to your inquiry because Target does not participate with nontraditional media outlets.”

The ad complaint aside, this response from Target was both interesting and surprising from an organization that seems to be on the forefront of cultural awareness and at least quite conscious of what people think about them. Anyone remember when they dropped “Christmas” for the more politically correct “holiday?”

The fact of the matter is that bloggers could be Target’s best friends. Target does what it does well and could get extended mileage out of that by harnessing the power of bloggers. These ladies are a perfect example of that. They love Target.

What Target is likely thinking is that they don’t have the personnel to respond to numerous blog posts and inquiries each day. I contend that Target can’t afford not to engage bloggers. Target says they only respond to traditional media, but traditional media is increasingly following bloggers and becoming bloggers themselves. This entire story was picked up by The New York Times for crying out loud. Target talked to them of course…so it’s a case in point. Bloggers can (and do) generate mainstream news.

I expect Target will take some heat from the blogosphere on this move. Kind of ironic they may find themselves in the cross hairs of bloggers given their logo. Target should do a couple things here:

1. Start a Blog ASAP - If Target starts a blog now they’ll have the forum for a public response in the same medium as the criticism. Likewise they’ll be prepared to address future blog requests on their own blog. This particular story would have been easily addressed on Target’s blog if they had one and they wouldn’t have had to concede if they disagreed with the ad complaint. The issue isn’t about agreeing with critics, it’s about engaging them at all. One blog and a part-time blogger could solve a lot of their problems and also make them better prepared to respond in the future. And that’s just the reactive help a blog brings. There’s a vast opportunity for Target to be proactive and positive with a blog, but that’s a whole other blog post.

2. Be Open and Honest - Here’s the thing about blogging, it’s a great medium that facilitates conversation and understanding, but if you’re not telling the whole truth, you’re going to wish you never said anything at all. I don’t think Target is trying to hide anything here, but this point is more about the tone and approach they should have when/if they start blogging. As long as they respond openly, honestly and candidly, people will see they don’t have anything to hide and that they’re willing to address concerns.

The rule of thumb is that when you’re silent or avoid questions people will assume the worst. When you address an issue head-on and quickly you don’t give it enough time to get a full surge of momentum. A well timed quick response can squelch an issue altogether. At the very least a quick response shows a willingness to address an issue publicly.

3. Ask for Help - If Target doesn’t understand how to get a blog started or how to respond to blogs, they should find someone to help. From a technical side, any blogger they find will be useful to them regardless of what their own blog is about. Someone with news or public relations experience is a bonus. This is just another reason why public relations people have a better mindset for new media marketing. It’s all converging both in medium and strategy.

[HT to Chris Abraham for this story]

Imagine we’re in a deep sea fishing contest. You and me. It’s a fishing contest for a full day. At the end of the day the winner is the one with the most fish by weight. Though we’re in the same contest we have two different approaches. You have assembled the best deep sea fishermen you can find. You have expert marlin anglers since the marlin is one of the biggest (one marlin can weigh over 800 pounds…here’s a 560 pound marlin) and most prized fish you can catch. You have the best boat and technological advances for finding the marlin. Catching a marlin is hard work but you’ve hired the best in the business and you know when you come in at the end of the day with several big marlins everyone is going to be very impressed with your catch.

My crew has decided to take another route. We’re going to fish with nets. Our boat and crew is smaller and less impressive than yours and we’re going to catch salmon. Salmon are considerably smaller than the marlin weighing anywhere between 6 and 100 pounds each. I know, however, that salmon swim together and a good catch could put us in contention for the prize.

At the end of the day we return with our catches. You had a great day with nine large marlins with a total weight of 5,300 pounds. We only had one catch with 400 salmon. As we offload our salmon on the scales we estimate the average fish in our catch is 28 pounds, much smaller than your large marlins but our team’s total catch weight is 11,200 pounds. It turns out the cumulative weight of many smaller fish is much heavier than a few really big fish. We win.

New media marketing is a small fish strategy. I think that’s why traditional marketing mindsets are unsure of it. They’ve never considered a small fish strategy because it’s the exact opposite of their focus. Big fish are traditional promotional strategies. Big fish marketing tactics include magazine ads, television and radio spots, billboards, newspaper ads, direct mail campaigns and the like. Small fish marketing includes new media tactics like blogs, podcasts, social networking, online video, social media, etc.

Big fish know they’re prized and know everyone wants to catch them which makes them harder catch. They require more effort and more expense with less yield. Small fish are numerous and concentrated. They’re cheaper and easier to catch with a higher cumulative yield.

Marketers are fishing every day. Most are going after the limited supply of big fish. A few are going after the hundreds of thousands of smaller fish. Sure, it’s great to catch a big fish if you can. Catching big fish is what the industry was built on. Sometimes a really big fish gets you raises and recognition and may even bring a high return.

A funny thing is happening now though. There are more and more small fish all the time and the means to catch them are widely available, easy to use, and often free. Once you know how to catch a lot of smaller fish why would you ever try to catch a big fish again? Forget the big fish.

Yesterday I spent a few hours downtown at the first BarCamp Nashville. I met Michael, the blogger behind Marketing Monster (thanks to Chris for the introduction) and he and I were talking about how we both have our degrees in public relations but work in marketing. It got me thinking about how new media marketing is really much more geared toward those of us with a a PR background/training and here’s why I think that:

New media marketing is largely unpredictable and uncontrollable. It works on its own time frame and cannot be forced or it’s quickly recognized as contrived and fake. When new media marketing works, it does so with a grassroots growth or viral explosion that seems to come from nowhere. It’s all the stuff that PR professionals live with and love about the business. It’s the idea of dropping a few hooks in the water to catch some really big fish…though in new media the value of a “big fish” is not simply the weight of a single fish (like a story in the New York Times for instance) rather the cumulative weight of thousands of smaller fish like bloggers, online video creators, podcasters, social networking friends, and shared photo references.

Marketers, especially the most traditional ones, seem to have trouble with the new media because they don’t think like PR people. They are accustomed to complete control over the message, image, creative development and brand. They don’t have ears to listen because they operate with one way messages. This is doubly bad because it means they talk only when they have planned to and are not prepared when a response in necessary.

Here’s what the disconnect seems to boil down to: the marketers are the ones focused on the emerging technology while the PR pros are not giving it the same attention. So while on the one hand you’ve got PR people with arguably the best mindset for new media marketing due to their inherent thinking, they don’t seem to have the knowledge or interest (I’ll have a personal example of that here on the blog in a few days.) Then on the other hand you see the marketers who have quickly seen the value of new media and salivate all over themselves for a big score but they don’t naturally have the best mindset to really do it right and end up making themselves look worse. Chris discovered an example of this two weeks ago.

Maybe new media will show us the closest convergence of PR and marketing that we’ve known. Maybe some PR firms will realize they have an opportunity to compete with ad agencies and marketing firms now. Maybe in the future there won’t even be PR firms, ad agencies, and marketing firms because they’re all rolled into creative communications companies that do it all. Maybe corporate communications offices and marketing divisions will do the same. Maybe it’s time for you to start moving this direction today.