10 Ways Digital Can Help You Thrive in a Recession

The question isn’t if we’re heading into a recession.  It’s how bad will it be—and what we learn from it? As marketing budgets feel the squeeze of the housing crisis and a slowing U.S. Economy, now is a good time to think about opportunities. That’s right. Opportunities. It just happens that the digital medium could be your best friend in a time when belts tighten. Here’s a few though starters for how digital can help your business or brand thrive in a recession:

1. Live by the rules of The Beta Economy
No other medium allows you to launch, test, relaunch, test, measure, tweak, re-tweak, evolve, relaunch, quite like the Web. Folks like Guy Kawasaki and Seth Godin preach about this all the time.  Guy launched his Truemors service on a shoestring budget and uses Twitter to promote it. When budgets get cut—look to digital for new ways of testing out ideas vs. big bang and big budget initiatives (think Bud.TV)

2. Leverage Existing Platforms
Why build from scratch when you can use Wordpress as a CMS, Basecamp as a collaboration tool and Concept Share as a way to co-create. Now is a great time to dig into the already existing platforms (in addition to existing social networks). While building from scratch has it’s place, there are more options than ever to tap into a service that just might do the job.

3. Switch Tubes
Consider skipping mass TV all together.  It worked for BMW films and with YouTube firmly in place—it can even work with less production values and high priced talent. Consider ways to make the participant the star. TV has kind of sucked lately anyway since the writers went on strike. Don’t know about you—but my TV consumption has gone from slim to nearly none.

Read full post at Experience Matters.

Comments

[Tom Messner]

The only time we are NOT heading into a recession is when we are already in a recession.
This is the first time I can remember when reports are that people are evidencing deep recession suffering with there being one.
Thriving in a recession is usually very relative, but certain ad agencies (Wells, for example) trumpeted recessions ("Hard sell for hard times," as Mary put it).
Rare that a recession occurs in a presidential election year; more likely to happen the year after. (7 out of the last ten recessions happened just after the inaugural.)
One new medium--radio--debuted in the Great Depression. Although sky-writing and sandwich boards gave it a good battle.