by Scott Howard | Jun 11, 2015 | Really? The Personal ScLoHo, ScLoHo's Web World
On a whim last month I decided to enter a competition. It was the 2015 Digital Marketing Awards for Northeastern Indiana, presented by KPC Media. Last week I was notified that I was one of the winners.
Actually what won is this website/blog that you are reading right now. http://www.scotthoward.me/ is the link if you are reading this on Facebook or Google+
Here’s the press release they sent Monday:
2015 Digital Marketing Award winners announced
FORT WAYNE, IN (June 8, 2015) – Greater Fort Wayne Business Weekly announces the winners of the 2015 Digital Marketing Awards, honoring outstanding businesses in northeast Indiana using digital marketing strategies to expand their reach, tell their stories and engage their customers.
The competition was open to all businesses in northeast Indiana. A panel of out-of-state judges with digital marketing expertise chose 41 category winners which were differentiated by agency designed and developed and those done in-house by businesses. From all category winners an overall Digital Marketer of the Year winner was determined in both in-house and agency. The judges, noted the impressive quality of entries and expressed that while not all 131 entries received an award, they all showed strength in their storytelling and visual presentation.
The winners will learn their winning categories and who will receive the prestigious Digital Marketer of the Year Awards at a cocktail reception on Thursday, June 18th, 5:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the Allen County War Memorial Coliseum Lounge. Tickets are available at fwbusiness.com under Events.
The winners are as follows:
AGENCY DESIGNED/DEVELOPED
Aptera
Britton Marketing & Design Group
Downtown Improvement District of Fort Wayne
Ignite
Marry Me in Fort Wayne
Waiter on the Way
IN-HOUSE DESIGNED/DEVELOPED
Allen County War Memorial Coliseum
86 Creative
3Rivers Federal Credit Union
Better Business Bureau serving Northern Indiana
Black Pine Animal Sanctuary
Indiana Tech
Manchester University
The Genuine Scott Howard aka ScLoHo
The Summit City
Visit Fort Wayne
“We were blown away by not only the number, but the caliber of the entries. They were really all quite remarkable,” said Terry Ward, CEO, KPC Media Group, publisher of Greater Fort Wayne Business Weekly. “The skill and creativity was incredibly impressive which tell us the businesses in this community know the value of digital marketing and invest significant resources in making sure it is effective and of the highest quality. We could not be more proud to present these awards on June 18th.”
More information about the winners will be printed in the June 19th edition of Greater Fort Wayne Business Weekly. For more information about event sponsorships and tickets contact events@kpcmedia.com.
I have been nominated in years past for other social media awards and quoted in some national publications on the subject of content marketing and social media.
The reason I write is not for awards. I am driven to write and share. It’s fun, it’s a creative outlet and I hear from others that often the information is helpful. That’s why I write.
I learned about this years awards a couple days before the entry deadline in a tweet and had no expectations.
But as someone once said, you never hit the ball you didn’t swing at.
If you are at the awards next Thursday, be sure to say hi and introduce yourself. I’ll be doing a follow up story later this month.
by Scott Howard | Jun 5, 2015 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Web World
It used to be that people were either labeled “close minded” or “open minded”. Then as technology began evolving faster and faster, people were labeled by their adoption tendencies.
Those who jumped on board before everyone else was an “early adopter”, followed by the “mainstream” and “late adopters”. There are still some that are completely “close minded”, too.
In Fort Wayne, I was one of the early adopters to join Twitter. I was mainstream when it came to smartphones and still don’t have a tablet. My ultrabook laptop serves me fine, thank you. 
In the marketing world, there is old traditional media like newspapers, magazines, television, radio, direct mail and billboards. There is also the web which used to be called new media. But because the web has been around publicly for 20+ years (Windows 95) and Facebook has had their 10 year anniversary, it’s not really new.
Sure there are plenty of new web platforms, some of which will live while others die a slow death, but the entire concept of using the web as a marketing vehicle is still seeing resistance from those who did not grow up with the internet.
So back to my question, Are You Open To New Ideas?
If you don’t have a website for your business, then you are not.
If you haven’t updated your website in the past 2 years, you may not be open to new ideas.
If you fall into either of those two categories, we need to talk. Just because you are not gung-ho on the web stuff, doesn’t mean you should ignore it. I know 60, 70 and 80 year olds who are web savvy and if you are not there, you don’t exists to them.
You don’t have to stop your other advertising methods completely, Many are still valuable. But let’s figure out the best way to combine the new and old. Contact me.
by Scott Howard | May 1, 2015 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Web World
There are a couple of online giants that are taking over more and more of your online world. Facebook and Google have become more and more powerful and I wonder how healthy it is to us personally and also business wise.
Last month it was announced that Facebook wants major news content providers to publish on Facebook instead of their own online entities. Currently when the New York Times or Washington Post shares an article online, that story is posted and hosted on the newspapers own websites and then they share a link on Facebook and other social media channels.
Now Facebook wants the story to be posted and hosted on Facebook, not just linked to from Facebook.
Facebook has grown from a way for Mark Zuckerberg to meet girls in 2004 to one of the worlds most powerful data machines. Facebook knows more about you and me than the NSA. It serves ads to each of us based on who we are and what they know about us. Facebook is offering sweet deals to news content providers to entice them to become part of the Facebook family but several folks are concerned that Facebook is becoming too powerful.
Facebook likes to changes the rules for what it allows and how it distributes content. A couple years ago when I was working fulltime in social media, I saw how one of those changes adversely affected our businesses ability to communicate with our customers.
We had to pay to be seen. Facebook was flexing their marketing muscle and businesses needed to cough up the cash to stay in the game. This practice continues and they will continue to make it more expensive for businesses to use Facebook as a marketing platform.
It was also pointed out to me awhile ago that Facebook seems to be emulating the old AOL business model. That was one where you don’t need the whole internet, you just need to go to AOL and AOL will tell/show/feed you what they think is important. Except Facebook is making money and AOL is best remembered for the discs they used to send us so we could connect with a dial up connection.
Now Google, that’s a harmless little company that you can trust too right? Remember their mantra, Do No Evil or something like that?
Google began as a search engine, added an email service and then started buying up all the other internet start ups. They can reach your email, ready the content on the web pages you visit, maybe even read your thoughts?! They supposedly know every search you have conducted and clearing your history or cookies or anything else won’t stop them.
Sounds scary, but we continue to use them. Like Facebook, they know more about us than anyone, even our parents.
But there is an upside to this. Imagine having a customized web experience. The 5% of the time we are online and searching for something, or the other 95% when we are reading stuff, all of that is tailored to you and me. Not as a group, but individuals. The search engine results, the banner ads, the content itself is more often than not being delivered to each of us based on, well, each of us.
This is heaven for a business that takes advantage of this technology. I offer these digital solutions, contact me at Scott@WOWO.com . And it actually offers a richer web experience for us as consumers too.
by Scott Howard | Apr 23, 2015 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Web World, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
For #ThrowBackThursday, I dug up this article from the 2008 ScLoHo archives.
(What are the ScLoHo archives? It’s been more than 10 years that I have been writing and publishing articles online. Over 10,000 were published in the first 8 years on various ScLoHo blogs that I used to update. Then in 2011, when this website went live, this became the central hub of all my online activity.)
The internet is a wonderful thing. And it is still in its infancy.
Think about the advent of radio or television broadcasting.
A nice invention, but how do you make money with it was a question someone must have asked a long, long time ago.
Eventually advertising was used to support this “free medium”. I say free, because after buying a radio or television, you were not obligated to spend anymore money except for the electricity to power the radio or t.v.
Later people started paying a subscription fee to get extra channels via a cable t.v. service. Those in the Television Broadcasting business locally tell me that penetration for cable, FIOS, or satellite services is 80% in our Metro.
Wow, 4 out of 5 people pay extra money each month to watch television.
Next thing, people will pay extra for bottles of water that is no different than the water they can get out of their tap.
See how we become conditioned to accept things through marketing?
Another piece of technology that changed our viewing habits was the wireless remote control. With dozens, no, make that hundreds of channels piped into our homes, can you imagine having to stand in front of your television to change the channel until you find what you want?!
The remote also made it easy for us to flip the channel when a commercial came on. But studies show, that the number of people that flip during a commercial break is directly related to the quality of the commercial as judged by the viewer.
So what about this internet thing? Can anyone make money with it? Yes, but it will take more than setting up a website and waiting for the money to come rolling in. Quite frankly, methods of advertising online that worked 5 years ago, are not as effective, generally speaking as they used to be.
Consumers have learned to tune out advertising, so it will take a marriage of advertising methods and creativity, coupled with the understanding of basic human emotions and behavior, to make an internet ad campaign successful. And odds are that within a few years, you will need to use different methods to reach your online audience, which is okay.
Now in 2015, the options for advertising online have become more and more sophisticated. What I can offer through the digital division of WOWO Radio’s parent company is light years ahead of what was available when I published this article 7 years ago. Want to know more? Contact me.
by Scott Howard | Mar 19, 2015 | Really? The Personal ScLoHo, ScLoHo's Web World
Back Up Your Stuff was the code of doing business ever since businesses started utilizing computers. I recall decades ago, my Mom taking home floppy disks from her office of her nightly backup in case the building she worked at burned down. Fast forward a few decades.
We live in the “cloud” on so many levels. Our personal, private and business related information is now stored somewhere other than just our hard drives and cardboard boxes.
The radio stations I work for have made it convenient for me to access everything I need from my laptop. I use Dropbox as one of my cloud services along with Google Drive and others.
Another way we live in the “clouds” is believing that all our stuff is secure on those cloud servers. We hear about data breeches every week and it’s not a matter of if it will happen to us, but when.
Recently a friend of mine was relying on Facebook to keep all her pictures safe. Then her account disappeared. Today, I urge you to take a couple of minutes and Back Up Your Facebook Stuff. I just did it yesterday and here’s how:
Use your laptop/desktop, not a mobile device and go to your page. On the right side you can click on the privacy settings, or the down arrow next to it.
You want to get to the general account settings page. There you will find the option to download a copy of your Facebook Data.
As of March 18th, 2015, when I downloaded my Facebook data, this is what it looks like:
For security purposes, they ask for your password:
After you have done this, they will email you when they have created the zip files and it could take a minute or an hour depending on how big your file is.
Save it somewhere if there is information or pictures that you want to save in case your Facebook account is compromised or lost.
And you’re welcome.
by Scott Howard | Jan 29, 2015 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Media, ScLoHo's Web World
At the end of 2014, I, like many of you, took stock of my year and decided to make some changes for 2015.
Some of those changes involved my online activity including this website. I am continuing to prune my Twitter connections and expand both LinkedIn and Facebook contacts.
For this website, I did a layout redesign and also created a new version of my “editorial calender”.
(An editorial calender is a fancy term for planning ahead what you are going to publish and having some sort of pattern or routine to it.)
My editorial calender is not laid out on a fancy spread sheet or on the back of a napkin. It’s in my head.
That works because, this website is my own creation. I launched it in 2011 and previously had several ScLoHo blogs that were also my own creation.
As I mentioned the other day, I am now in my second full year at WOWO and Federated Media and that is where I make a living. This website is my own marketing machine, but it’s actually more of a creative outlet than anything else.
It’s not a direct money maker, but it is a promotional tool.
See my goal in life professionally is to help others make smart decisions with their marketing and advertising dollars. Sometimes I can help them directly, other times, I’m simply pointing them in a direction.
Tomorrow, I’m going to do a review of the month with links to articles that you may have missed.
And here’s what I am planning on doing next month:
I am going to be transparent about the price of advertising with me and WOWO radio, more than anyone probably ever has, at least publicly.
You will see how we set our prices and why. You will see some of the options and we’ll talk about the value of each and also the why.
The articles I am going to write would have cost me my job a few years ago when I worked for another group of radio stations in Fort Wayne. They were very paranoid and secretive. During the time I worked there, they asked me to stop sharing all of this advertising and marketing information online.
But I don’t work for them anymore and I am free to do what helps me help you.
Let’s not make this a monologue either. Let’s continue to make this a dialogue. You can reach out to me with a comment, or contact me directly with the connections listed below.
Apple Podcasts
Google Podcasts
Spotify
TuneIn
Deezer
CastBox