Get an Ad, Get Free Stuff!

If you’ve been running a small business with a store front that caters to your local community, odds are the word “advertising” makes you cringe. You think of endless cold calls, pushy sales people and hard earned dollars turning to vapor, and all for what? A few clicks from google, a couple radio ads and a huge stack of promotional balloons collecting dust in your closet, all of which that never turned into anything?

Business owners everywhere rejoice because the world of local small business advertising is changing for the better. On the heels of Groupon.com, LivingSocial.com and some other really amazing new advertising concepts comes Ad My Auto. This new service combines the loss leader marketing concepts of Groupon with the highly effective nature of word of mouth, direct marketing and mobile billboard impressions to create something entirely new but oddly familiar.

For a low fee of $985 per year and an astoundingly attractive $50 per ad, Ad My Auto will place an ad for your business on a minimum of 50 consumer vehicles in the zip code of your choice. In return, your business provides free and discounted services to the “Ad Partners” (the persons hosting your ads). This system will be highly attractive to small business owners with 1 or more brick and mortar locations (ie., restaurants, grocery stores, spas, salons, liquor stores, dentists offices, etc, etc, etc..). Amazingly, Ad My Auto works on multiple levels of market saturation beginning by providing the micro level of loss leader marketing to groupon’s macro share. But I fear I’m getting ahead of myself.

Ad My Auto works on 4 levels:

1) Grouponesque loss leader marketing.

Your “perk program” will directly incentivize each and every Ad Partner who hosts your ad to purchase your products and services, resulting in the guaranteed acquisition of every person who hosts your ad. For only $50 per ad, that’s an unbelievable deal (We expect that price to go up when Ad My Auto launches on a larger scale.)

A great impression in rush hour traffic!

2) Mobile billboard advertising.

As your Ad Partner drives around, your business gets local impressions. Use your ads with a call to action message (mention this ad for $2 off any menu item!) or pure branding (Joe’s plumbing – The most trusted in town!) and prepare for more business. People who need a repair are quick to pick up their mobile phone when prompted by an ad in their face offering a free service call. Folks tired of eating Pizza Hut every week are looking for excuses to try something new and your Ad My Auto ad is the excuse they’re looking for.

3) Direct marketing.

Ad My Auto has a herd of Ad Partners on their waiting list who are ready and willing to put your ad on their car. For most advertising companies, this would be an inexpensive, sure fire way to meet their client’s ad quota, but it just wasn’t enough for Ad My Auto. In addition to placing your ad with local vehicles on their waiting list, they’ll go door to door in the zip code(s) of your choice asking your local, potential customers if they’d like some free and discounted services from your business in exchange for an ad placement on their vehicle. Even if the ad gets turned down, they Ad My Auto street team has still created awareness of your business as well as an opportunity to give out a coupon, menu or any other literature that you provide them with.

4) Word of mouth.

We weren’t initially sure if it was fair to include “word of mouth” as a service Ad My Auto provides, but when we really thought through it, it really made sense. Hosting an ad on one’s car leads to an array of guaranteed questions from friends and family, “what’s Joe’s Plumbing, and why do you have that ad on your car?”. People will be forced to talk about why they’re hosting your ad, and when they do, they’ll brag about the free stuff you’ve given them.

There are different levels of local penetration you can opt in to. The most inexpensive being their trial penetration. At only $985 per year and $50 per ad, Ad My Auto costs as little as $300 per month for a one-stop, all you can eat, marketing smorgasbord. You’d be crazy to not try it out (again, while it’s so cheap!). Just remember to factor in your hard costs for providing your perk program.

We’ll be watching Ad My Auto closely from here out, waiting to get in on an investment with them when they go public.

With their user base of 20,000,000 tweeters growing every day, it’s obvious that twitter is here to stay. But for how long?

New, viable technology seems to come out of the woodwork every few months or so. MySpace was the king of the social networking kingdom until facebook came along and conquered it. Now twitter is here, and while facebook hasn’t become obsolete as a result, twitter is most certainly eating into facebook’s market share. What’s next? Fardo? Zigmat? Breadstomp?

Thus, this social networking ninja believes it inevitable that by 2015 twitter will be an afterthought. With that said, I should add a caveat that as twitter hasn’t even established a real revenue model it’s a bit early to be playing Chopin’s Funeral March. Instead, I’ll bring to light some potential draw backs and flaws with twitter as it currently stands.

Firstly, like most social media, twitter is home to tens of thousands of spammer accounts. There isn’t anything quite like a solicitor to drive people away from, well, anything. While I feel it acceptable to use software and trains to find niche followers, the use of automated tweeting programs is wholly antithetical to the purpose of social networking. Social media is supposed to be just that: Social. It is my opinion that spammers crack the foundation of social media such as twitter and as such they should be unfollowed and left to die or change their methods. There isn’t a thing wrong as far as I can tell, with promoting your blog, website, business, etc, with honest to God, helpful, informative or otherwise REAL tweets.

The solution to this problem? Unfollow spammers. There are several great tools that work to that very simple end. TweetBlocker gives a grade (A+ thru F) to each and every person you follow. When it finishes compiling the data, which may take some time for larger accounts, simply sort by grade and delete Fs and Ds. Aside from using software to fix our problems we also have to be diligent to moderate our own accounts. If you suspect someone you’re following to be spam, have a look at their recent tweets by clicking on their avatar (their picture). If you see them tweeting over and over about mundane things like what show their watching, it’s likely that they are spamming with some kind of automatic tweeter. If every tweet they make contains a link to a site or some kind of sales pitch, unfollow them.

I’m pro-twitter for sure, so let me just remind you that scrubbing our accounts clean of spam will help ensure twitter stays viable for as long as possible.

Lastly, a downside I see with twitter is that as it’s going on year 4, it still suffers technical problems like downtime and over-capacity errors. I don’t know what they’re waiting for to fix these problems, but I haven’t personally seen the same issues with facebook. If the trend continues as twitter grows, it’s likely that people will get frustrated with it and move on. And what will they move onto you ask? Well, as I mentioned earlier, those with the technical prowess and creativity to come up with the new frontier in social media will provide something. And that’s really all it comes down to. Maybe it will be a page that follows what you’re doing on the web right now. Maybe it will social bookmark, update and post comments on blogs for you based on your surfing habits. Maybe it’ll remind you to buy milk next time you’re out. Whatever it does, it’s coming!

Is Twitter great? Yes! Will it be here forever? No. Our recommendation: Tweet on, don’t automate your tweets and give those that do the boot. Also, be aware of new, rising social media. And like you should do with twitter, ride the wave as long is it will last!