Social Media

Without a doubt, the underlying theme of the Digital Mixer was the integration of social media marketing with traditional efforts. Many sessions also built out systematic strategies for social media success. Mike Stelzner of Social Media Examiner drove home the need to identify “fire starters” in your space and making your content easy to share. Fire Starters are social media users in your category that have power, access, and audience. However, he cautioned simply tracking them down and pimping them right away. Rather, he encouraged building relationships with them first by doing a lot on their behalf (retweets, blog posts, etc.) before asking them for anything.

Social media measurement is emerging as something to keep an eye on. According to MarketingProfs research, few companies feel they have a good grasp on measuring social media impact and ROI. One of the biggest hurdles that businesses are struggling to understand is that while social media is theoretically free, there are costs associated with it. Time — employees or agency time to listen, manage, and converse. Fellow Hawkeye Amber Naslund of Radian6 made the comparison that while social media has costs it’s no different than taking a client out to eat or for a round of golf. It’s being social.

Search

Bill Leake of Apogee Search first had me sinking into my chair a bit when he said that agencies needed clients to find homes for their art. To his credit, many agencies do operate in this capacity. However, Westergaard has always worked to be a strategic partner first and foremost. To build on this position, I asked Bill what agencies can offer clients. “Agencies are valuable in search because they can challenge Google’s recommendations,” Bill replied. “Have you ever noticed how Google’s suggestions for getting better results are always spending more money with Google. An agency can filter these recommendations and help the client make the decision that is best for their campaign and their business.” An agency’s job is to know the clients’ marketing plan, know their concerns, and their budget.

Email Marketing

It’s interesting to go to sessions on a topic you think you know as you often end up totally blown away by how much you do not know or are not capitalizing on the full potential of. Of all media discussed at the conference, our greatest history is with email marketing.  However, Greg Cangialosi of Blue Sky Factory offered much more than a simple 101 at his eNewsletter session. The big idea here? Always be testing. Optimize your email campaigns. Think you are getting good results? Great. Test some variables and make them even better. I was reminded of one of my favorite sentiments about testing by Stephanie Miller of Return Path who said: “Even when you’re wrong you know something. There are no failures in testing.” Clients: look for more email testing from Westergaard in the months ahead.

Oh, and for all those saying that social is replacing email? (Looking at you Wall Street Journal.) Greg hit the nail on the head when he offered “Email is the digital glue of the social web.” While social media has many hot triggers to engage and persuade customers, the inbox is still a very special place be.

Blogging

On Thursday, we started the day with breakfast roundtables by topic. I chose blogging (pictured above) and enjoyed a lively discussion with about half a dozen peers moderated by the great Mack Collier. Among the many great ideas Mack imparted was one that I specifically have struggled with here on this blog. As a small business, you end up wearing many hats. I more than understand the value of blogging and we have gotten tons of positive feedback and even business from it but sometimes, due to all of those hats, you just don’t have the time to blog at the quantity that others do. Mack’s advice? If you can’t write a ton, make up for it with quality and consistency. Do one good post a week (or even once a month) and deliver it consistently so your audience expects it. Make the 2nd Tuesday of the month your blog day. Look for me to be finding such a day sometime soon here.

Miscellaneous Overall Advice

In wrapping up the keynote discussion on Wednesday, the panelists were asked if businesses could do only one thing what should that be? Word-of-Mouth Marketing author Andy Sernovitz had an answer that spoke to me. “Whether it’s tweeting, texting, status updates, blogging or email, much of new media is based on writing. Be a good writer.” Perhaps this spoke to me because it is somewhat self-serving as a copywriter by trade but I think it is worth calling out. Often the focus of emerging media is the new technology while the craft put into its utilization is sometimes overlooked by the masses. Which brings me to another agency takeaway of Andy’s. “Marketers aren’t expected to be technology innovators. We talk to customers. Don’t look for the next big thing. Wait until your customers are there then listen and talk to them.”

Pound-for-pound, Ann and the good folks at MarketingProfs put on an information-packed event. I got so many great ideas. I also got a Flip Camera HD in a drawing (for the conference planners out there – you can’t beat a good, old exhibitor scavenger hunt — great way to get attendees asking vendors questions). Plus the event lived up to its name. It was truly a mixer. Idea were mixed, people mixed through networking — they even had experts in white lab coats as “mixologists” who attended all sessions in a given track and mixed up the key ideas and summarized them for the group at the end.

If you’re already a client of ours, I can’t wait to share all of this with you. If you aren’t yet a client, contact us and we’ll grab coffee and get social.

Photo credit: MarketingProfs Live

On my run this morning (working off more literal snacks), I thought of the work ahead of me when I returned to my desk — editing a video, writing a blog, uploading photos, tweeting across several client accounts. None of these projects resembled creating what we think of as traditional ads. And yet, I think the term ’snacks’ can be misleading. I think the preparation of quality info snacks demands as much craft, devotion, and time as creating traditional modes of commercial messaging. And, as alluded to in our last post, you need a recipe if you want it to come out right.

Your guests are hungry. Are you leaving out enough snacks?

I say struggling because you have the new logo on bottles, cans, boxes, displays, etc. on most shelves and now you also have an odd end-cap featuring these throwback logos. Note how I said ‘most shelves.’ That’s because I have a hunch that if I walk into my local store I can still find a Pepsi logo of the previous generation (on the less popular Wild Cherry Pepsi or an outdated display, perhaps). So add all of this up and there is a chance that a consumer could end up seeing three different versions of the same Pepsi logo in stores right now (1. New logo, 2. Logo immediately previous to the update,  3. Throwback logo). The logo immediately previous to the update can’t be helped as they are still very early in a large-scale branding transition. The impression they could have prevented was introducing this Throwback series.

This minor strategic blunder should help bolster all our collective branding confidence. As marketers, we often find ourselves looking to the big dogs (Pepsi, Apple, Starbucks) for inspiration but even they get it wrong sometimes — as evidenced by a campaign that needs to be thrown back for another year or so when there’s less confusion on store shelves and in consumers’ minds.

The red birds debuted the “Play Like a Cardinal” campaign a year or so ago and are wisely continuing it for the upcoming season. It’s pretty easy to be ubiquitous with sports marketing but this campaign really cuts through the clutter. The above video from the Jumbotron is a campaign centerpiece — combining the team’s rich history with powerful images and moving words. It also makes me wish I was at Busch stadium with a dog and a beer. Here’s a link to all of the new 2009 spots. My favorite by far is the discovery of Pujols’ secret identity.

(This is also a little experiment to see how long it will take Dean — Mr. Brewer himself — to demand the removal of this Cardinals-centric post.)

The point? It was hard to do business with Monopoly. Not hard in a way that I couldn’t overcome but I would have bought earlier had the experience been a bit easier. Sometimes if you take a step back you can see that your business has a lot of sales barriers in place that you may not have seen. Did anyone at Parker Brothers question that perhaps with the development of I Love Lucy Monopoly “California Here We Come” Edition that they were on there way to overwhelming some customers? A minor concern? Yes. Worth discussion? Absolutely.

Here’s a tip: the next time you have a meeting or retreat with your team write the headline above — Is It Hard to Do Business with Us? — on your wipe board and discuss away. Make a list and start picking them off. Not overnight but over time you will streamline your customers’ experience and leave fewer people confused in your aisles …