What Apple’s New iPad can Teach you About Marketing Your Business Online

January 31, 2010December 21, 2020 Matthew O'Brien

Earlier this week, Apple launched its long-anticipated new device called the iPad with the usual media fanfare. While they set up a microsite to deliver the details of the product, comment on our post about duplicate content vs. content syndication by Greg Head of New Avenue really highlighted what Mint Social has been preaching to our clients for the past couple of years:

I am seeing more and more examples of how search engine activities and clicks are moving off of commercial websites to where the content and conversation is. After Apple’s iPad introduction yesterday, I read 20 articles on the iPad and checked the Twitter stream for more opinions – I never went the Apple.com website at all. My time was 90% content reading and 10% conversation reading. It’s a content game for sure.

So what can this teach you about marketing your business online? Well, it means that you need to get your message out to where the conversation is happening on the internet. Your website, while important as the central publishing hub of your businesse’s content is really just the beginning. Nobody really cares about your website. In fact, as we have said before, traffic to websites like yours only accounts for about 25% of all internet activity. A whopping 75% of activity on the internet is done on social networks and bookmarking sites. You NEED to be pushing your message out as far as you can as quickly as you can to the places on the internet that people are having these discussions–I call it the iWaterCooler (Take that Steve Jobs ;)) Now many people think that this means merely reposting your blog post on Facebook and Twitter and 3 or 4 other social networks. While this is better than nothing, it is only a small fraction of the picture. It is what we at Mint Social describe as content duplication. You want to syndicate your content–not duplicate it. Content syndication is where you take that one blog post and blast it out to 50+ spots on the web that are looking for content like yours. It is the difference between being a parrot or a printing press.

While this may seem like a daunting task, there are tools that can make this a whole lot easier. We will discuss that in upcoming posts. Stay tuned!

Matthew O'Brien

With over 20 years of experience in the digital media world, Matthew has worked for and with Fortune 500 businesses and has built companies from the start-up stage to exit strategy. He recently helped develop a data insight engine to bridge the gap between search, social, and mobile marketing to maximize the visibility, relevancy, and predictive success of online businesses. Matthew is the founder of MINT Social, an award-winning digital marketing company that accelerates online marketing results to help businesses get found and thrive online. Matthew has developed an educational curriculum for Universities on social media for businesses, is a founding board member of the Arizona Innovation Marketing Association (AZIMA), a board member of HeroZona Foundation and on the advisory board (Vinnies) for St. Vincent de Paul - Phoenix. Matthew is a mentor with ASU Entrepreneurship and Innovation Group, a speaker on social media and digital marketing, and is a subject matter expert with many online portals.