Its snowing in New York City and it is beautiful. As I write this week’s piece, there is a heavy downfall over Bryant Park outside my office window. And of course, it’s February. We shouldn’t be getting this much snow. But whether you believe in global warming or just the universe and weather, its here. And it leads me to talk about the Winter Olympics.

97 million US viewers tuned in to watch the first 2 days of the Olympics this year. That’s close to the 100 million that tuned in in 1994 when U.S. figure skater Tonya Harding’s ex-husband and bodyguard attacked Nancy Kerrigan. I also read that if every Chinese household watches the Olympics, that’s over 1 billion viewers right there.

But no matter how many people watch the Olympics on TV, it still will never compare to the amount of people who will tune in via the Internet on home and office computers. Sad thing is, according to Bloomberg (businessweek.com), Fairfield, Connecticut-based GE has said NBC will lose $250 million airing the Vancouver Winter Olympics (ok – not really THAT sad). Darn it. Why hasn’t NBC called me yet to help them with Internet strategy! HOPEFULLY they make that money back by airing things on YouTube and Hulu and on their own site. Interestingly enough, 183,000 views have been recorded just to the commercial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUlJahUtm04 for the Vancouver, BC, Canadian 2010 Winter Olympics. I predict that for actual content and clips of various events and happenings, the true number will far exceed a measly 100 million. I would say at least a billion for US and then billions more worldwide. And if the various media vehicles monetize correctly, it should spell out to gross much more than the $250million lost on the antiquated boob-tube.

And just to keep things in perspective, 2 weeks ago I reported on Super Bowl commercials. It appears that the winner in this race is the spot for Doritos named “House Rules” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0EVSP_6XZA). But wait, there’s more. Doritos didn’t even create the commercial. If you check out the site crashthesuperbowl.com, you will see that these commercials were created for free. All user-generated content. Doritos paid for it with a $25,000 contest for the 6 finalists. Then one of them gets an additional $1m, $600k and $400k. Basically, instead of paying an advertising agency millions of dollars, they are throwing it back to the work out of your house creative geniuses who don’t work for corporate America 9-5. (On the other hand, maybe they DO work in a corporate job and did this in their spare time and made a cool $25k – $1mm in their spare time.

My point is that the Internet keeps on winning out as the best way to market your product. Get fans of your product to sell your product for you. And reward the people who make it happen. There are plenty of terrible commercials (and websites) out there, created, written and produced by huge advertising agencies for millions of dollars. If advertisers want to get the biggest bang for their buck, they will listen to me and rely on the web to sell their product with smart Internet marketing managers (hopefully me and my company And as my new sales guru Jeffrey Gitomer says, “you need poll your own audience.” He suggests creating a seminar and inviting all of your customers. And whether they can come or not, ask your customers why they buy from you. You will be very happily surprised to get these answers. Then obviously use this information to get new customers and buyers of your products and services.

It’s also the 2010 Mercedes Benz Fashion Week here in New York, NY in Bryant Park. As I watch model after supermodel get in and out of taxis on my block, I realize that they have a pretty good thing going on. Each year, fashion designers from all over the world come to my house (ok, across the street from my office) and strut their stuff on the runway. Once again, if you think that it’s about the event, think again. When I searched for “2010 Mercedes Benz Fashion Week,” Marc Bouwer comes up with the #1 video with over 40,000 views. I guarantee you that Marc is having a great show this year!

So my message this week is to think about the short term with the long term marketing in mind. Photograph your events. Video them. Write about them. Blog about them. Oh. Did you say that you don’t have any events going on? Well then, CREATE them! Can’t think of an event to create, borrow one from the newspaper, current events, the sports section or the calendar. In addition to the Olympics and Fashion week, this week is the beginning of Baseball Spring Training. And it was also Valentine’s Day and President’s Day and the Daytona 500.

Need help figuring out a long term, short term or event driven NYC Internet Marketing strategy, give me a call at 212-993-5828, send me an email at raphis@salemglobal.com or visit www.SalemGlobal.com. I will guarantee we will come up with something in 5 minutes of having a conversation. Next week we will talk more about the Olympics, content and Internet strategy. Oh and my latest book, Slackonomics by Lisa Chamberlain.