by Scott Howard | Jan 17, 2017 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, ScLoHo's Web World, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo
Years ago, a friend of mine named Anthony gave a presentation on the power of Word of Mouth via Facebook.
It opened a lot of eyes.
Businesses that were looking to advertise and get more customers started to rethink the way they were doing things with traditional advertising methods like radio, television, newspapers and magazines, even phone books and billboards .
It also frightened some in the advertising world, thinking that they were about to lose their jobs if traditional advertising was going to disappear in favor of Social Media.
Fast forward a dozen years or so and social media is not new media anymore, it’s a standard marketing option that many have grown up with. Yet there are still some unanswered questions pertaining to How Does Social Media Fit in Marketing Your Business? 
Before I answer, my own credentials: over 20 years working in traditional media including primarily radio but also print and online. I served on the local American Advertising Federation Board and got to know the strengths of nearly any media along with their vulnerabilities. I also worked full time in website development and ran the social media marketing for a $50 million international e-Commerce company.
So I’ve seen a bunch and experienced a bunch.
The example that Anthony shared years ago was a friend asking on her Facebook page for recommendations for a new dentist. She had a couple dozen Facebook friends chime in with recommendations and a few warnings about dentists that they did not like.
There was nothing special about this except it was now happening online instead of in person. Social Media simply gave anyone with access to the internet the ability to engage in two way communication online instead of just over the phone or in person. Word of Mouth now had an additional platform.
Businesses wanted to figure out how to reach people looking for them on social media and although it has evolved over the years, advertising on sites like Facebook have been around for quite some time.
Facebook continues to change the algorithms that determine what you and I see when we are looking at our newsfeed. They made a big change when I was working fulltime in Social Media that shrunk the number of people reached organically with our posts by 75%. Why did Facebook do this? To make money. Piles and piles of money.
I quickly discovered that I could reach even more people on Facebook by paying for the post to be boosted and it worked. Facebook continues to refine the advertising options and there will never be an ideal formula… count on the changes to continue forever.
But while there is a distinct difference in organic Word Of Mouth marketing and Advertising of sites like Facebook, consumers don’t usually grasp the differences.
MarketingCharts.com released a study with statistics showing that 40% of people have bought something they saw on social media. It also said 2/3rd of adults use social media every week. What they cannot measure is the true power of a particular trigger factor that prompted an individual to spend money. That has always been the case, even before the internet.
Now I sometimes will use the tools that I have to show my advertising partners what we can measure online, but I always use the disclaimer that the numbers are only part of the story.
Should you and your business use social media to market your business?
My answer is nearly always yes.
Why? It’s because that is where your customers are.
Should you only use social media?
Probably not, it is limiting just like any other marketing you are thinking of.
But please don’t just act on these blanket statements as the gospel for how to successfully market your business.
You need an individual assessment, and that’s where I come in.
Contact me for details.
by Scott Howard | Jan 5, 2017 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Collective Wisdom, ScLoHo's Web World
The other day I shared an article that urged you to consider how customer focused you and your business are.
Today, a deeper dig into some specifics. 
This great insight from Laurie Petersen arrived in my inbox from Mediapost this week about improvements each of us need to make to create a more friendly customer relationship online:
Customer Experience Wish List For 2017 by Laurie Petersen
Out with the old, in with the new. With the spirit of encouraging positive change, we crowd-sourced this list of 10 customer-experience annoyances everyone wishes would go away.
1. Disconnected customer service systems that require you to enter the same information again and again and again each time you switch to a new department.
2. Captchas that are so obtuse it takes five times to get it right.
3. Mobile and web sites that don’t talk to each other or remember your information, even when you ask them to.
4. Retargeted advertising that keeps selling you after you’ve already been sold.
5. Robo-callers that tell you what you already know.
6. Shopping sites that require entering convoluted discount codes.
7. Deceptive pricing.
8. Communications that don’t discern where you are in the purchase cycle.
9. Employees who lack the training and knowledge to answer basic questions.
10. Websites that offer no way to ever connect with a human for a voice conversation.
What’s missing from the list?
This list is a great start, Laurie and there are others answering her question at the Mediapost page where this was originally posted.
When I first scan the list, number 4 really caught my attention.
4. Retargeted advertising that keeps selling you after you’ve already been sold.
One of the marketing solutions I offer involves a more sophisticated method of retargeting than I’ve seen anywhere else and it has built in to the solution a trigger that helps solve this issue.
Contact me if you want details.
by Scott Howard | Sep 20, 2016 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Media, ScLoHo's Web World, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
It’s a question that some people ask out loud and others may not ask me directly but they are thinking, “Why Does a Radio Guy Also Sell Digital Marketing Solutions?”
Excellent question.
Here’s the answer.
My background is in radio. From the time I was 16 until I was 26, I loved being on the air. Then I moved over to the business side creating ad campaigns in Detroit for my radio clients. I became a student and teacher of marketing, advertising, sales, persuasion, and something I call human relationship marketing.
Jump ahead to 2005 and I started using digital (the web) to market myself using the same concepts I had learned 15+ years earlier.
With me, Scott Howard aka ScLoHo, you get to work with an individual who understands both the traditional broadcast world and the newer digital world. I walked away from my paying jobs in radio twice in recent history to work full time in the digital world. The first time was in 2011, when I joined a website development firm. A couple years later, I joined a multi-million dollar e-commerce biz as their Social Media director.
Now I work for WOWO radio which is one of the stations owned by Federated Media. Federated Media also has a digital division, Federated Digital Solutions. 
Federated Media created Federated Digital Solutions because many of their radio advertising clients were also looking for ways to market themselves online. Federated Media decided to invest in creating another division of the company. During my three years, I have seen our digital division grow and we now have 20+ people working for Federated Digital Solutions.
Those 20+ people at Federated Digital Solutions (FDS) have a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. The goal was to find the best available talent in the country and create the FDS team.
But there’s more.
Several of the digital solutions use outside vendors that we have access to that you simply can’t buy on your own. We also have two layers of expertise working on all of these digital marketing campaigns. There’s the expertise of our vendors and the expertise of the FDS team.
With me, you actually get a 3rd layer of expertise. Me. Scott Howard aka ScLoHo.
Because of my background, experience and knowledge, I really do know more than most of my radio co-workers. No, I’m not a know-it-all, but I do know how to Google to get the answers on stuff that I don’t know.
Here’s something else that’s important.
I care more about my reputation than what I sell.
I care more about your success than what I sell.
When I started at WOWO, I sold next to nothing from the digital solutions offered by FDS. I wanted to see the results and I wasn’t willing to use my advertising partners as test subjects. But as I watched, observed and questioned, I saw that the performance of the Federated Digital Solutions team was top notch. I also got the opportunity to see what other companies were selling and through that comparison, I saw how we were superior to others.
I’ve seen what Nexstar Broadcast Group was trying to sell as digital solutions and it was crap.
I’ve seen the actual results of Dex Media and what they sold to come of my advertising clients and did digging and found a huge pile of manure.
There are a couple of local companies that are selling digital marketing solutions that are worthless. My friend Kevin, called it marketing malpractice when we were discussing what I was seeing, and Kevin is one smart dude when it comes to doing digital marketing correctly.
Advertising agencies, both local and national are understaffed and under-qualified to be doing the digital work they are selling.
This summer I found out one of my advertising partners bought a website for $27,000 from one of these advertising agencies and it’s really messed up. Sure it looks okay to the naked eye, but it is impossible to optimize for the search engines (SEO) due to the platform they built it on. We can rebuild it for less that 1/3 that cost.
One last item in answering the question, “Why Does a Radio Guy Also Sell Digital Marketing Solutions?”
There actually is a study that shows how broadcasting works best in driving people to your website. A couple lines from the article that caught my eye:
Here’s why radio and TV have the advantage: While print media requires hands, broadcast media leaves them free to do other things . . . like type in a URL, tweet something, or click “like.”
Want to talk? Let’s connect
by Scott Howard | Sep 18, 2016 | Really? The Personal ScLoHo, ScLoHo's Web World, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo
I hate spam. It’s not a tasty treat and it’s pretty annoying when it fills your email inbox too. 
So today, I’m going to reach out to those of you who are still using Yahoo!, Hotmail, or heaven-forbid, AOL as your main email account.
I used to be one of you and it was so annoying to see all the junk that was making it past the spam filters on those platforms.
Here’s how to Eliminate Spam From Your Inbox.
I hope you’ve heard of Gmail. Google introduced it in 2004 by invitation only and I jumped on the waiting list. By 2007, it was available to anyone. Gmail is a free, advertising-supported email service provided by Google.
What caught my attention at the time was how effective Gmail was at filtering spam. It was virtually fool-proof. Still is, although there are a few that slip into my inbox each month.
But I receive up to 150 emails each day, not counting the spam emails which alone can top 100 each day. Do the math and you’ll see why I’m impressed.
Here’s a screenshot from my gmail spam folder the other day:
A sample of the spam email I receive
Those emails are automatically routed into a spam filter in my gmail account. Also if I get some spam that makes it into my inbox, I just press a button and it will automatically be filtered in the future. You can also tell gmail to NOT filter certain emails to spam.
Also, see all those spam emails with attachments? Those could be very dangerous. Do NOT open unless you want to risk infecting your computer and companies systems.
I highly recommend you switch to a gmail powered email address, just to save yourself time of sorting through spam. And here’s a few ways to do it. Google each of these:
- You can set up your old email account to start forwarding all new incoming email to your gmail account.
- You can even export your old emails from your other accounts and import them to your new gmail account.
- You might want to simply send a “here’s my new email address” to all your contacts, but I would still recommend doing the other two steps.
- Import your email contacts into your gmail account and then stop sending emails from those old accounts. Your contacts will get the message, except for your 95 year old Aunt Agnes.
Google’s gmail service is also available for businesses and you can keep your old business account name. For 10+ years, my email address @ScLoHo.net is really a professional gmail account. It’s because of this spam filtering feature that I splash my email address all over the web.
Questions? Ask. Or just Google it.
by Scott Howard | Sep 8, 2016 | Marketing and Advertising Insights, ScLoHo's Web World, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo, WOWO Fort Wayne Radio Advertising with Scott Howard
I saw this quote a few times this year,
If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.
And I’ve also heard people react to the way they are being tracked and targeted by “Big Data”.
Big Data is simply the information that is gathered about us electronically and organized online.
Some of it is very specific, other is general.
We have been voluntarily providing this information for years.
Your first email account perhaps was a hotmail, yahoo or aol email address. Or if you are younger, maybe gmail was and is your email service of choice.
These free email accounts were collecting information about me and you and that was just the beginning.
Facebook and every single social media platform is gathering data about you.
Your phone with its built in GPS, knows and tracks where you go.
When I got a new phone last year, I added some apps for gas stations, grocery stores, restaurants and a few others to take advantage of “discounts”. You may have some on your phone too.
As the quote says, if you didn’t pay for any of these services, your data is what is being collected and sold to others.
We give our data freely. In return, we are targeted with ads and offers that are customized to what Big Data knows about us.
They even tell us when we absent-mindedly agree to the T.O.S. (Terms Of Service) agreements that we click on without reading when we sign up for the free stuff.
It’s not bad and it’s not good. Data collection is neutral. It’s like money. It can be used for good or evil.
In reality, none of us who do anything online can escape and we really don’t need to.
If you want to use this Big Data to locate and target your future customers, I can do that. 
My company has partnered with the best vendors to offer these online services, more than I can explain today. We call it Opt-In as part of the Federated Digital Solutions and radio divisions of our company. Contact me for details on how we can do this.
In the meantime remember,
If you’re not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.
and relax.
by Scott Howard | Aug 30, 2016 | ScLoHo's Web World, The Not-So-Secret Writings of ScLoHo
The website you are currently viewing is going to undergo a few design changes.
I’ve done this before and will do it again I’m sure.
I just wanted to alert you that over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be trying out a few different custom themes and tweaking them. My goal is to have the big changes done no later than the week after Labor Day.
Most likely before.
I mention this because I “broke my website” the other day and while it only took 15 minutes for my host to fix, that may not always be the case.
This is another reason why I don’t do the heavy lifting of creating websites, I have others who do that through the company I work for, the digital division we call Federated Digital Solutions.
But this website is solely mine and mine alone.
Drop me a line if you see something weird at Scott@ScLoHo.net
Otherwise….
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