The Big Fat Marketing Blog

Maybe it’s time to tighten the belt again?

Last week we posted a report that consumers are planning on spending less this holiday season. Now The Conference Board says consumer confidence has dropped in October, which means we may have an even bluer Christmas than expected.

Lynn Franco, director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center, says labor market conditions are playing a major role in this grimmer assessment. Franco says the short-term outlook has also grown more negative: a greater proportion of consumers anticipate business and labor market conditions will worsen in the months ahead. more

So did you hear that there’s going to be a Free Shipping Day on Dec. 17, and all merchants are invited to participate? I heard about it, because I read it in The Briefing Room.

OK, that was kind of a cheesy plug for the new service of Multichannel Merchant. But I needed a cool way to tell everyone that The Briefing Room has launched, and why you need to visit it each and every single day. more

There are a lot of people who feel “The Office” has jumped the shark (The American version, in case Sherry Chiger is reading this in jolly ol’ England!). Even those people probably tuned in last night to watch the wedding episode (”Niagara”) had to admit it had its downright hilarious moments.

But for me, it was two pop culture events in social media that The Office’s writers cashed in on that made it Must See TV (even if NBC doesn’t use that slogan anymore): Dwight wearing his Three Wolf Moon shirt, and the reenactment of JK Wedding Entrance Dance. more

I wrote this piece yesterday for Multichannel Merchant about updated Federal Trade Commission guidelines that will force bloggers who receive swag or cash in exchange of a blog post to disclose their relationship with product or service.

And after I heard Emilio Amodei, founder of BlogVertise, discuss how his company can get your product blogged about by hundreds of bloggers, I had a red flag go up.

I can see someone with a product or a service wanting to get exposed by bloggers back in 2005 or before. But now we’re in an era of product ratings and recommendations. And consumers are savvy enough to go to, say, Amazon.com and see what people who have used a certain product has to say about it, rather than trusting Joe Blogger who may just say nice things for the payout.

It’s all a matter of trust, and I think Joe Consumer is going to trust sites with ratings and recommendations before a blogger.

What do you think? Is the blogosphere a reputable enough place yet? Or for that matter, are readers smart enough to see a product pitch as a product pitch?

My hobby/freelance work took me to the U.S. Army All-American Bowl’s jersey presentation tour yesterday, where Stamford (CT) High School linebacker Khairi Fortt was announced as a member of the high school All-American team (today they go up the road to King School to present Silas Redd with his jersey. Both players will attend Penn State).

So the side-story for me, the one I could bring back to The Big Fat Marketing Blog, had to do with the game’s sponsors. more

The video below was played yesterday at Shop.org’s annual summit, between keynotes delivered by Terry Lundgren of Macy’s and Sucharita Mulpuru of Forrester Research. It’s a video I’ve seen before - matter of fact a Facebook friend posted it to her newsfeed recently when she got hired in a sales position with a social media consultancy.

Now of course it built some excitement for social media. Just play it and see. The upbeat music, the positive facts about social media usage, and so forth.

The problem is, we’re all missing the boat with social media. And for merchants, social media may not be 100% worth the hype. more