On July 11 the iPhone 3G went on sale at a slashed price of $199. In three days Apple hit the one million mark for iPhone units sold—and did it 25 times faster than its previous phone launch. Over the weekend I received a number of text messages sent from iPhones—by people who I thought would never even get a smartphone! I had been mistaken. Besides pondering a purchase myself, this event got me thinking about a key marketing metric and the importance of ascertaining it: Perceived value.

Regardless of what type of company you are, a key ingredient to success is honing your customers’ attention and their perception of your products or services. It doesn’t matter what you are selling, or what your price is—if your customer’s perception is favorable, that is what ultimately turns into sales. In the digital age, building and maintaining relationships has become easier and any business that neglects this is missing a major opportunity.

Digital marketing strategies allow you extra control over your relationship with your customer by allowing you to specify targets, timing, tone, and more. This can move the needle when it comes to reception of your messages, as well as customer recall when it comes time to make a purchase decision.

Take Apple. I received an email on July 10 titled, “iPhone 3G. In stores Friday.” While I didn’t have an interest in waiting in line solely for the cachet of having an iPhone the first day it came out, as I passed the lines Friday morning, I knew what was going on. The email blast I had received informed me, and allowed me to participate in the iPhone event; even though I wasn’t a purchaser, I felt like a member.

And yeah, I’m 80 percent sure I’m going to get one. I don’t even know all the product details, but my first impression is a strong one—an impression that has left me only a 20 percent probability of not purchasing. That’s pretty good, Apple, especially because I should be “above the influence.”

Whenever I get an email update from Apple, I pay attention, as many do. Of course, this can be expected with one of the world’s most recognized brands, but we can all still learn from Cupertino’s example—both as an exceptional marketer and as a company that understands that digital technologies, including mobile, are what will keep its brand relevant for years to come.

-Shaneli Ramratan, Marketing Manager, mobileStorm

Sometimes it’s easy to joke about digital marketing’s perceived generation gap. “You don’t want to use it to promote something like Depends,” we’ll scoff when talking about a digital media platform—whether an SMS poll, RSS update, or email newsletter—used by cutting-edge marketers.

But that attitude ultimately harms us marketers. First, because we’re automatically writing off yet another channel to reach a particular group of consumers. Second, because we’re showing ignorance about said demographic: They’re not just interested in (or even in need of) incontinence products, and they do indeed consume digital media same as everyone else.

I came to this epiphany this week after reports that the 108-year-old Olive Riley—touted as the “World’s Oldest Blogger“—passed away some two weeks after her last post. The Australian lady started sharing her stories more than a year ago, after becoming close friends with a documentarian who, it seems, would type and post Olive’s thoughts for her since she suffered poor eyesight. (While some don’t consider “Ollie” a “real” blogger because of this, I want to say that I know a well-regarded video-blogger who needs other people to film/edit/post the video for her—and she’s considered no less a “vlogger” than others.)

Ollie’s posts rallied folks of all ages, especially the elderly. She became a “hero” to senior citizens “struggling to understand the Internet,” her typist Mike says in this tribute post. The blog became so popular that it sometimes crashed from the weight of hundreds of thousands of readers. In turn, readers often communicated with Ollie via email or comments. While she couldn’t read their words of support, she had a friend read all of them to her every week—and would even sometimes mention a few readers in the next post.

The world’s oldest blogger offered lessons that all marketers should heed. She successfully created a digital community around herself. She engaged loyal readers by listening to and acknowledging their comments/emails. And she proved that yes, there is a way to communicate with elderly consumers via digital means. Thanks to her, increasingly more seniors are going to get into blogging, emailing, and other forms of messaging.

Maybe brands catering to older demographics should reconsider conventional wisdom and start up digital message campaigns, too.

Eydie Cubarrubia, Marketing Communications Manager, mobileStorm
“I’d rather you text me”

I was surfing the web the other day with a friend of mine who is a musician and not remotely involved in online marketing. Basically, my friend could be an everyday customer for any company out there (including mine). After landing on a secondary page we decided to go to the homepage, but couldn’t find the link. I automatically said to click the logo at the upper left of the page (of course!). Then it dawned on me: As digital marketers we eat and breathe this stuff. This makes it difficult to remove our own personal expertise and think about site visitors on the front end. Clicking the company logo, I realized, is not an obvious pathway to the homepage.

This was not just an isolated incident by an inexperienced web user. Website design for small- to medium-sized businesses is super important when building your brand online. A good place to start is by looking at your very own homepage. While you may have limited resources to make a ton of changes, asking yourself a few questions will help you evaluate your best course of action and some simple fixes.

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I’ve been asked from time to time about how I find certain information on the web—information that others struggle to discover. So I’ve decided to share some tips on how to be a better searcher and actually find what you are looking for. This isn’t too difficult; usually if what you seek is on the ‘Net, you’ll likely find it. When I don’t find something, I think it’s just not there.

Here are my top five tips on successfully finding info on the ‘Net:

Use Search Operators to Narrow or Widen Your Search

Let me guess: When you search for an email marketing solution, you just type in “email marketing solution” (with or without the parentheses) and hit the “search” button. This a very generic search string so you’d find lots of sites offering email marketing solutions.

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