Celebrity Merchandising. Cash Cow or Brand Killer?

What happens to consumer perception when Rihanna is, quite literally, discounted?

I happened to stumble upon a Target end-cap dominated with Rihanna merchandise on an aggressive clearance. That event, coinciding with my recent reread of The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, led me to question the micro-effects of poor brand management.

Read the full post: Merchandising could be damaging celebrity brands

How Rubber Ducks Can Help Prioritize Your Corporate Initiatives

The prioritization of corporate initiatives is hard.

In my experience, when we’ve reached such a stalemate it’s time for kindergarten-like solutions…we’ve got to oversimplify rather than reach for spreadsheets, Project, ERPs, etc.

Ducks and Buckets is my participative and physical process of high-level, organizational prioritization and resource planning.

Read the full post to learn how you can prioritize using ducks and buckets.

Forget The Business Best Seller…Read A Rap Autobiography

Is it time to expand our reading lists beyond the world of the best selling business books?

I recently finished the autobiography of rapper Prodigy – one half of the iconic rap group Mobb Deep.  An insightful book, Prodigy shares a rich blend of his life, career, and personal perspectives.I picked up the book out of personal interest.  Surprisingly, however, I found an extremely powerful business lesson for marketers; a lesson superior to the platitudes we disappointingly find in many of today’s ‘best selling’ business books.

Read the Full Post:

Marketing Lessons from Mobb Deep’s Prodigy 

Campaign Consciousness Can Strengthen Your Brand

Being a marketer I’m easily engaged and excited by unique, innovative marketing concepts.  Show me an interesting, creative advertisement or promotion and one of those kid-in-an-unattended-candy-store smiles will come across my face.

Just recently I experienced such a promotion from the marketing and creative agency Hodgson/Meyers (www.hodgsonmeyers.com)…a promotional pitch in the form of a metal lunchbox.

In my opinion, however, there was one critical component missing.

Read the full post:

Hodgson/Meyers Creative Marketing Concept

Are You A Brand Archaeologist?

What Thrift Stores Have To Do With Enterprise Brand Identity Efforts

I believe we need to take part of our brand identity work out of the conference room, out of deep SPSS analysis, away from focus groups, and into our local thrift stores for some ‘Brand Archaeology’.

Brand Archeology is a physical, visceral, and tactile brand identity exercise that expands our thinking beyond market research, Illustrator, and design meetings.

Read the full concept:

Brand Archaeology

How TheLadders May Be Releasing Personally Identifiable Salary Information

As originally published on Lumension’s Corporate Blog – Optimal Security

The Responsibility of Data Ownership and the Care it Demands

Anonymous data isn’t always anonymous…despite our intentions or best efforts.  Just this week, I received an startling reminder of this fact in an email Newsletter from TheLadders CEO, Marc Cenedella.

Through the contents of that email, TheLadders may be leaking the exact, personally-identifiable salaries of its customers (likely without their knowledge).

Read the full story on Lumension’s Corporate Blog – Optimal Security

Three Reasons Why You Need To Use Google Voice

With the recent demise of Google Wave (which I conceptually loved but, admittedly, didn’t use) I want to champion a Google tool that I do use…preemptively addressing any ‘app-house-cleaning’ whispers within Google.  That tool is Google Voice – a fairly powerful Web-based phone management system that includes the assignment of your own, local phone number (you may also recognize by its pre-acquisition name: GrandCentral).

While I have read a few articles on conceptual uses of Google Voice – phone number consolidation, customized voicemails, etc. – I have yet to find an article that provides some tangible, real-world, sign-up-now examples.  Even one of my respected solution sources, LifeHacker, seemed to be neutral toward Google Voice.

Fearing for the safety of my beloved application, I have – in the true spirit of marketing-motivated ‘top’ lists (e.g. ‘top three things you need to know about social media’, ‘top 10 things wrong with your website, etc.) – compiled a list of three specific uses for Google Voice that you can implement.

After this read, you should be compelled to sign up today and start using Google Voice (and, yes, yes, start sharing more of your personal data with Google…you’ll be fine, take off the tinfoil hat).

1. Google Voice and Your Luggage Tag

Flickr - Sun Dazed

If you are like me, and a bit of a narcissistic airline traveler, you must still assert your authority over your luggage as it is gently laid on an airport conveyer belt [sarcasm].  We usually do so by attaching a flimsy, personally indentifying paper tag to our bags…you are mine and I am yours.  I include my phone number on my tag, as recommended by the U.S. Department of Transportation:

The bags you check should be labeled – inside and out – with your name and phone number. Add the name and phone number of a person to contact at your destination if it’s practical to do so. Almost all of the bags that are misplaced by airlines do turn up sooner or later. With proper labeling, the bag and its owner can usually be reunited within a few hours.

As comforting as the above statement is (‘sooner or later’…hurrah!), the reality is that lost baggage is the number two complaint for airline passengers;  behind issues with ticketing and boarding but, interestingly, ahead of complaints regarding delays and cancellations.  In fact, according a report by the U.S. Department of Transportation, 165,246 pieces of luggage were lost in October 2009 (over 5,000 pieces per day).

With so much lost luggage, where has your highly protected mobile, home, direct-line phone number been spending its time?  Perhaps it’s with the Arizona couple that stole over 1,000 pieces of luggage; data mining might have been more profitable than the contents of all those bags.

Using a Google Voice phone number on your luggage would make you more available while adding an additional layer of ‘protection’ for your personal information.

2.  Google Voice and Your Career Search

Flickr - SOCIALisBETTER

In previous posts, I have detailed my concepts on bringing more intelligence to a career search by tracking hyperlinks in resumes and monitoring your social media profiles.  I believe Google Voice can be used in a similar, powerful application for your job search.

Two features and their potential application:

Assigned Phone Number – use your Google-assigned phone number on applications, resumes, online profiles, etc. as your primary phone number.  By exclusively using this phone number in your job search, you can actively monitor and manage your candidacy.  In just one example, you could quickly identify and prioritize calls when you see an incoming number from a Google Voice-forwarded phone call.  Your early awareness would help ensure the right phone demeanor, attitude, and readiness.

Caller-Customized Voice Mail – Google Voice allows you to record and play different voice mail messages based on the caller (when it can be identified).  Combining this functionality with the ‘inbound’ phone numbers of perspective employers you can bring unique visibility to your candidacy.  Using Google Voice you could – where appropriate for the corporate culture, hiring manager, or position – greet callers with a customized voice mail that thanks them for their call and concisely reinforces your candidacy.

Today’s competitive job market demands differentiating attentiveness, creativity, and relevancy…use Google Voice to assert yourself and your candidacy.

3. Google Voice For Small Business Marketing

Freeimagedepot.com

Larger enterprises often have wonderful telephony systems that can track calls sourced from various sales and marketing campaigns.  With this data, organizations are able to quantify performance and measure success of various offline and online tactics.  This same concept can be emulated by small and very-small businesses with a Google Voice phone number.

Google Voice could be used to track your small business campaigns:

• Track phone-based inquiries from your website; listing your Google Voice number or using the Google Voice ‘call me’ feature.
• Identify prospects calling from a print mail piece (e.g. coupon flier, ad, etc.).
• List your Google Voice number on your business card for tracking referrals (i.e. distributing ‘referral’ business card to current customers), activity from networking events, etc.
• Place your Google Voice number on your work vehicle and track how many calls are generated from placement on business assets (could also be rental equipment, service tags, etc.).
• Use a Google Voice number as a ‘preferred customer’ line that identifies callers and greets those that cannot be answered by name/special reference in voice mail.

These concepts, and others, can bring Big Business sophistication and intelligence to every small business entrepreneur.

Oh, I have others… (but I know you’re tired of scrolling)

I know there are many other powerful, liberating, and inventive uses for Google Voice.  Dating and the ‘single scene’ (talk about screening and filtering)?  How about the freedom to use a phone number in your Craigslist ad (be available and protected)?

Have others?  Post some comments, share the knowledge, and let’s preemptively save Google Voice.

The Social Presentation – It’s great that you’re embracing social media but are you really listening?

It’s pretty exciting to watch how we, as marketers, have grown to embrace social media in a relatively short time.  In particular, we have come to recognize the fact there are dialogs being created outside of our efforts.  Notably, and most dramatically, we have seen this take shape in our presentation environments.

Today, a real-time social dialog among audience members often accompanies a presentation or webinar.  With this understanding, we’ve begun to encourage and support that dialog with hashtags and active monitoring.  That’s great…but are we really listening?

Webinars and ‘Social’

Early this week, I attended a marketing webinar sponsored by two well known and well respected marketing companies.  As in-the-know ‘social marketers’, they supported their webinar with a Twitter-based dialog.  Including:

• A hashtag specific to their presentation.
• The hashtag included on each slide of the presentation.
• Verbally encouraging the audience, throughout the presentation, to take their dialog to Twitter.

And so the webinar began and the social magic unfolded…

There was a stead stream of tweets throughout the webinar (about 250 total tweets using the supplied hashtag).  The audience was so engaged on Twitter, that the presenters and moderators mentioned so in their dialog several times throughout the webinar.

Social success! Right?  Well, kind of…

Hearing Versus Listening

Most of us grew up with our parents, teachers, etc. telling us that there is a difference betweeen ‘hearing’ and ‘listening’.  My webinar experience was a perfect example of that important, distinct difference.

So there was this great 200 plus tweet activity racing alongside a decent presentation, but the tweets were not turned in to dialog by the presenters…they were relegated to threads, stand-alone statements.

I noticed this problem when the webinar came to its Q&A segment.

While there were a stream of questions in the tweet-cloud, the questions that were addressed (and answered) were those entered into the actual webinar hosting platform.  Those attendees (like myself) posting questions to the webinar hashtag were left out in the cold of the Twitter-sphere (even though we were encouraged to use Twitter for questions).

Great, You’re Social, Now Begin Actively Listening

Speaking from experience, it is not easy to present, maintain a decent pace, track time, and monitor audience questions/engagement…especially in a live webinar.  The fact that these presenters were, at least, aware of the activity on Twitter is better than many other webinars I’ve attended.

However, to truly turn ‘social’ into ‘dialog’ we have to put the right supporting processes in place in advance of encouraging audiences to social channels.

There are two simple steps to ensuring your next social-supported presentation creates dialog:

#1 Structure Your Social Search To Find Questions

Most commonly, we are driving audience members to Twitter (supported by a hashtag) for their accompanying dialog.  When setting up your next presentation make sure you are doing the following to explicitly ‘find’ questions:

1. Advanced Search – create a search in Twitter or, better yet, your favorite Twitter client using your presentation hashtag (e.g. #mypresentation) and the ‘?’ search operator (e.g. #mypresentation ?).
2. Designate A Search Moderator – find a person that can specifically monitor the ‘question’ searches and respond or collect them for later reponse.
   1. It’s Just You – use a Twitter client with alerts (like TweetDeck) and stored searches for you to refer back to during Q&A.

#2 Encourage the Community to Respond

Depending on your topic and audience, leverage the knowledge in your audience to help field the questions of other attendees.  At the outset of the presentation, encourage your audience to follow the hashtag as well and to answer their fellow attendees’ questions.

Follow up after the presentation and comment on those threads (continuing to use your presentation hashtag):

• Praising excellent answers.
• Clarifying or enhancing answers.
• Correcting incorrect answers.

This follow up, in addition to extended your knowledge, also provides an opportunity to drive audience members to follow up information or content.

Will It Matter?

Giving your audience a voice is great, listening and responding to their comments, questions, and needs is true, value-added dialog.  As is the case for many of us, our presentations and webinars are an opportunity to generate interest, and ultimately, new business.

The more actively we listen and engage the better we present our messages and brands.

You’re social media ears are open…now invest the time in be able to authentically engage and respond.

Marketing Micro Tactics – Thoughtful Filenames Of Offers

Marketers, we must sweat the details…sometimes the small stuff has significant value.  I know it may seem like an unrealistic statement in these days of multiple, conflicting priorities and limited resources, but our marketing efforts are often the first point of engagement with prospective customers.  So how detailed?  I believe there are a set of marketing micro-tactics that easily get overlooked in bustle of our daily activities.

In this particular post, I am talking about the filenames that we choose for our online resources (e.g. whitepapers, webcasts, etc.).

What’s In A (File)Name

Currently, a popular marketing tactic is to provide prospects with an offer for ‘premium content’ in exchange for their contact information.  Especially popular in B2B marketing, marketers are engaging prospects through value-added content in the form of case studies, relevant resources, and free tools.  Commonly, these pieces of premium content are delivered to prospects as downloads that they can save to their local computers.

We usually do so much work to create these pieces of premium content – content creation, design, proof reading, development, lead capture and management – that we overlook the filename we are giving to these documents that will be download by our target audiences.

Rather than thoughtfully name these files, they are often an assemblage of someone’s first stab at a filename combined with inline versioning identifiers.  The example below is a whitepaper from SuccessFactors detailing how to maximize your human resources to improve execution.  The filename itself is not clear on who or what.

Why Are Filenames Important?

Branding
Your piece of premium content often is the beginning of an engagement with a prospect ; each point of contact is an opportunity to positively represent your brand.  Many times a user will not choose to rename a filename when they download and save your content.  A thoughtful, clear filename is a strong representation of your brand.

Even marketing experts – like MarketingProfs (below) – struggle with the small details.

Viral Distribution
I’m sure you have a compelling piece of content that a prospect will be compelled to share with others.  Usually, we forward on pieces of content to our colleagues/network as an email attachment (even a type of file share).  I doing so, the filename will help to form a first impression with that new.

Continued Reference
Premium content has the potential to live long after a prospect has filled out a form and left our website.  It is highly likely that prospects will reference your material sometime after their initial download.  This is especially true in the elongated buying cycles in many B2B sales engagements.  Consequently, your filename can be import for easy recollection and search.

A Process For Thoughtfully Naming Files

I believe that while it is valuable to have conciseness in filenames, we can capture the spirit of that concept while including the components below:

Personal or Brand Identification

Start by identifying yourself or your organization; qualifying the material and with whom the prospect chose to engage.  I think it is okay to use meaningful abbreviations when a full name may be too long (e.g. ‘WebEx’ instead of ‘Cisco-WebEx’ or ‘Hewitt’ instead of ‘Chris-Hewitt’).

I recent came across the following example after reading Tony Jeary‘s Life Is a Series of Presentations.  Here we have an example of a great resource – downloaded from Tony’s website – but the filename does not accurately reflect his personal brand.

Clear Subject

Often suggest that this should be different than the title of the piece of premium content.  The titles for our case studies, whitepapers, webinars, etc. are often thoughtfully crafted to attract the attention of our target audiences.  At this point, however, someone has been appropriately engaged and is downloading our content…we’re past the opening lines.  I find it best to quickly summarize the subject of the material.

In the example below, ‘Social-Media-Improving-Customer-Service’ would be a meaningful yet more digestible component of the filename.

Contact Method

We can take this opportunity to include some contact information, especially social media channels, in our filename.  While it may not work in all circumstances, I believe this is especially important for individuals in their personal branding efforts.  For example, you can easily include your Twitter handle in the filename (thanks to azbado for the technical QA).

The example below highlights one of my social media resources I provide on my website.  As I know that my audience for this material is interested in social media, I take the opportunity to include my twitter ID (shown in a ‘viral’ email attachment context – click for larger image).

We Already Care About Many Filenames
The concept of thoughtful filenames isn’t, conceptually, a foreign concept for us as marketers.  We carefully consider the filenames for our ‘Internet indexed’ materials like webpages and images.  We just need to carry this concept into our other distributed materials and make each character of a filename count.

As the next piece of premium content passes your desk, give a little more love to its filename.

Forget the Experts, Let the Musical Group TLC Teach You About Social Media

You have likely attended, read, researched, or paid for information about Social Media and how it can be leveraged in your business (especially true if you are a marketer).  Like you, I have invested – and still invest – a healthy amount of time learning about the emerging concepts in Social Media. With so much to discuss, I find that the dialog is severely fragmented.  Where can we turn for a clear, concise message on Social Media?  Music.  Removing the layers of complexity and conjecture I think we can simply sum up Social Media in the song ‘Waterfalls’ by the musical group TLC.

I believe a lot of the complexity and noise is due to our liberal attachment of the word ‘strategy’ to Social Media.  Sure Social Media is new and exciting but we’re inadvertently giving this tactic a pretty big corporate ego; even its once popular digital counterparts (e.g. email, SEO, etc.) are jealous of all the new-baby attention that Social Media is receiving.

So let’s forget the ‘expert’ advice and see what TLC knows about Social Media.

Breaking Down the Song
Waterfalls (on lala)

by Marqueze Etheridge, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, Organized Noize

Source Wikipedia

Don’t go chasing waterfalls,
Please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you’re used to,
I know that you’re gonna have it your way or nothing at all,
But I think you’re moving too fast.

Social Media Basics #1 – Be Realistic, Be Honest
‘Don’t go chasing waterfalls, please stick to the rivers and the lakes that you’re used to’

I was attending an excellent webinar last week on new media that had a lot of engaging content and shared experiences.  I was thoroughly enjoying the presentation, until the presenter leaned heavily on Blendtec as the goal for [all] marketers to reach for and achieve.  Uhhhhh, no…you just lost me.

Yes, Blendtec is one of many great individual examples of viral marketing performance.  However, using the marketing wisdom of TLC, the Blendtec video campaign is a ‘waterfall’…one that is highly conditional and not easily replicated.  The ‘success’ of the campaign is not sustainable as it is dependent on an ever-widening top of Blendtec’s demand funnel.

Unfortunately, these are the examples that are generally held up for marketers as what they should be achieving. Blinded by the huge dollar signs we neglect to see the ‘success’ of Blendtec as a general exception to the rule.

We need to be realistic in our approach to Social Media.

Rather than chase that awesome viral video or amazing Tweetup, we need to think about what social interactions and information:

• Do our targeted audiences value?
• Can be energetically supported within the organization?
• Will authentically represent the organization’s culture?
• Can return consistent value to your targeted audiences?

Social Media Basics #2 – Letting Go Of The Message
‘I know that you’re gonna have it your way or nothing at all’

What a perfect line, TLC really knows Social Media…they were well ahead of their time.  So after we are all hopped up from the sugary delights of Social Media case studies, we excitedly begin discussing these new tools in our organizations.  Most of us marketers are pumped!  Our colleagues, however, are usually a little skeptical and others are completely and belligerently against Social Media.

And so the corporate negotiations and rationalizations begin; structured thought and processes are established to ‘guide’ Social Media.  As a result, many organizations use Social Media as another tool to push and control a message.  Symptoms of this condition include:

• Highly moderated and restricted communities (fear of negativity).
• Filtered comments (control).
• Days spent formulating responses to comments/events in the social cloud (over-analysis).

We have to be okay letting a dialog develop – positive or negative, informed or misinformed – and rather focusing our efforts on vigilantly monitoring and thoughtfully responding.

Social Media Basics #3 –  What Value Will You Return
‘But I think you’re moving too fast’

Often the investment in Social Media thought processes are reversed; we spend countless time developing policies and procedures but don’t invest enough in how we are going to reach and return value to our audiences.  Instead we begin immediately focusing on the ‘tools’, not our messages, our audiences, and our responsibilities as marketers.

A similar parallel can be drawn to the mad Internet rush of the late 90’s when businesses realized they needed a presence on the ‘World Wide Web’.  Consultants were hired, teams were created, and websites were launched!  Many organizations, reacting to their delayed entry into the Internet, rushed to check a box (oftentimes a very expensive box).  The result of that rush were a lot of brochure-ware websites that did little for the user or the organization.

Social Media is particularly dangerous as there are often little to no hard costs to using its tools.  With low financial barriers to entry, we blindly load up on tools and ignore our audience.

Return to the questions I posed in the first section; let the answers to those questions determine what tools and mediums to use in your Social Media efforts.

A final note, and equally important, these concepts also apply to our own, personal Social Media efforts.  Our personal brands can be positively shaped by adopting TLC’s advice on Social Media.  Be thoughtfully engaged, helpful, and collaborative.

While I know that TLC intended their song to have a broader message promoting social awareness, the next time you sing along to ‘Waterfalls’ I hope you also think of the direction of your Social Media efforts.