Archive for the ‘Advertising’ Category

Will Social Media Change the Face of Modern Marketing?

By Debi Kleiman, President of MITX (Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange, creators of FutureM)

The very foundation of marketing is transforming before our eyes, and social media is playing a bigger and bigger role in the way marketers communicate.

MITX’s FutureM offers the community a week of events exploring the future of marketing and media, designed to promote innovation and bring the community together around the biggest and most exciting topics facing marketers today. FutureM events address the changing role of social media in marketing, so we reached out to our socially savvy event partners to find out their answers to the following question: “What is social media’s role in the future of marketing?” Here is what they had to say:

  • Ian Cross, Professor of Marketing at Bentley University
    “Social media is woven into the fabric of social discourse and upending conventions about what should be shared, discussed, and presented to society. But the medium is not the message; the message is defining the medium. Technologies will come and go, but the free exchange of real-time information is exciting, and it is challenging organizations and consumers. Tricky questions of censorship, organized riot and revolt, and online identity will need to be resolved. But right now, let’s embrace the unfettered exchange of ideas and technology that bring us together and resist efforts to command and control.”
  • John Fichera, Boston University student and intern, The Castle Group and CMO, FutureM Student Committee
    “Social media makes marketing personal. For example, if you see that one of your friends is into a certain product or brand (e.g., via Facebook), then this can spark your interest to at least research the product, raising name recognition.”
  • Chris Pollara, CEO of Convertiv
    “As adoption continues to grow, social media will become the preferred connection point and education vehicle between brands and consumers. Leading organizations will need to adopt and scale accordingly. Well-executed campaigns will motivate your community by fostering natural, self-sustaining conversation centered on consumer-generated media.”
  • Matt Rainone, Manager of Strategic Marketing at AMP Agency
    “The future of social is less about the channels and more about how, when, and where we’re accessing them. Our emotional connections to our devices point to a future where our social profiles, location-based services, and mobile payment systems converge to create an always-connected, one-step-from-purchase lifestyle.”
  • Marty Watts, Director of the Meltwater Group
    “In the future, social media will alter the role of (PR, advertising, and digital) agencies, and more importantly, how these service businesses are run. By leveraging the slew of new social media technologies, these organizations will be able to drive down fixed operating costs while generating net new revenues through digital client work. It will be exciting to watch which agencies embrace this sea change and succeed and those that cannot adapt and go the way of the Dodo.”

Social media is evolving as a force—if not THE force—in modern marketing. As e-commerce and social grow together, websites like Twitter, Facebook, and the young Google+ are becoming the playground for experimental marketing. This is creating new challenges for marketers, buyers, sellers, and others within the social ecosystem. As innovations—such as Facebook’s “Sponsored Stories”—show, there are plenty of up-and-coming ways to turn social media into a powerful marketing medium.

The modern social media strategist must be part technologist and part behaviorist. As marketing leaders, we must be willing to experiment with and implement technology while studying the changes in human behavior that come with new and evolving social media adoption. As our experts stated above, we are in the midst of foundational change. Who’s brave enough to create social media’s future?

Posted in Advertising, Advertising Agencies, Branding, Community, Debi Kleiman, E-Commerce, Facebook, Google Plus, Innovation, Interaction, Marketing, Networking, Public Relations, Relationships, Strategy, Sustainability, Twitter | Comments Off on Will Social Media Change the Face of Modern Marketing?

How to Overcome Your Own Fear of Social Media

By Phyllis Zimbler Miller, co-founder of Miller Mosaic

Have you recently found yourself standing in the checkout line at a chain drugstore hearing an ad for a product that includes a reference to social media? For example, you may hear, “Follow us on Twitter or ‘like’ us on Facebook to learn about our new products.” And you say to yourself, “I’m so glad I don’t have to worry about those things for the marketing of my company’s products and services.” If you’ve been reassuring yourself thusly, you’re dead wrong.

Social media is here to stay. And if you don’t want your competition to trample you into the ground, you need to get with the program right now!

The irony is that, once you admit you don’t know enough about how your company can benefit from social media, and you resolve to learning more, you’re already on the way to harnessing some of the power of social media. Why? Because the most effective use of social media is sharing information with others, as opposed to selling your products and services.

A little secret that makes a big difference: when it comes to social media marketing, almost everyone has to start at zero. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve grown up with Facebook or without computers, the concepts of using social media effectively for marketing have to be learned. Why is that? Because effective social media marketing goes against the grain of traditional advertising/marketing. Instead of pushing out our company’s messages, we have to share information with our prospective clients and customers, be responsive to answering their questions, and think of the benefits of our products and services from their perspective and not ours.

For example, consumers in the age of Facebook are probably not very interested in how many employees your company has or what your headquarters looks like. But they probably are interested in how much easier or more fun their lives will be if they use your products or services. And you can show rather than tell this by sharing information on social media sites.

Let’s say you manufacture a revolutionary new food blender. Besides sharing the revolutionary benefits of the new features, you can also sponsor a food blender recipe showcase in which people share their own recipes on your company’s Facebook page. Your food blender gets publicity created by its own fans. And those fans can share their enthusiasm for your new blender with their friends on Facebook, who can share with their friends on Twitter, who can post videos on YouTube, etc. And the concentric circles get bigger and bigger.

It’s okay to start at zero knowledge regarding social media marketing, as long as you commit to moving forward to an ever-increasing knowledge base. If you do this, you and your company can look forward to connecting with your prospective clients and customers in ways you never could have imagined possible only a few short years ago.

Posted in Advertising, Competitors, Customers, Facebook, Marketing, Phyllis Zimbler Miller, Twitter, YouTube | Comments Off on How to Overcome Your Own Fear of Social Media

“Like” is the New Link: How Facebook is Reorganizing Google’s Web

By Dave Kerpen, CEO of Likeable Media and author of Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook (& Other Social Networks)

You wake up one morning and your back really hurts. You’ve been putting off finding a new doctor ever since you moved to town, it’s been forever since you’ve had a check-up, and now you’re paying the price.

The pain is too much to wait any longer, you’ve got to find a chiropractor now. So you grab your computer, go to Google.com, and enter “back doctor” and your town’s name. You see a list of a ten chiropractors who have paid Google to be listed there and dozens of others who come up in the organic search results. But do you really want to trust your throbbing back to a complete stranger in an emergency?

Then you think of another idea, and you head to Facebook and again search “back doctor.” At the top of the results is a doctor’s listing with a sidebar telling you that three of your friends “like” this chiropractor. “Sweet,” you think. “Someone I can trust, because my friends like him.” You make a quick call, and you’re off to get your backache taken care of by a recommended doctor, a professional your friends “like.”

This scenario and scenarios such as this aren’t happening en masse quite yet, but the use of Facebook and the social graph for search and commerce isn’t far off. Think about it. Why would you possibly make a decision about a doctor, an attorney, a mechanic—or any important product or service for that matter—based on advertising or Google placement when you can make that decision based on the preference and recommendations of trusted friends? Facebook and social media have made it infinitely easier to do the latter. It’s nothing short of a gamechanger for marketers and businesses of all sizes.

The great news about the new world of communications we live in today is that everybody has a shot. Build a great product, get the word out to a few people, make it easy for people to share with their friends, and you can win without spending a boatload. Just five years ago, for instance, if you went to a new restaurant that you loved, you might have shared your thoughts with a few of your friends, family, and/or neighbors. Perhaps if you really loved the restaurant, you may have raved about it for a week to as many as 10 or 15 friends. Today, you can share those thoughts with 200 Facebook friends, or 300 Twitter followers, or 150 LinkedIn connections—all with one click on your computer or smartphone!

No matter what the size of your organization or client’s business, you too have the ability to follow the simple rules of social media to reap the rewards. Senior management—and anyone in a communications position for that matter—needs to know that marketing in a social media and Facebook world is not about broadcasting your message and getting the largest reach and frequency, it’s about tapping into the conversation by listening, engaging, and empowering. The loudest, biggest spenders don’t win anymore—the smartest, most flexible listeners do.

Posted in Advertising, Conversations, Customers, Dave Kerpen, Engagement, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Listening, Marketing, Relationships, Search Engine Results Pages, Smartphones, Social Search, Social Shopping, Twitter | Comments Off on “Like” is the New Link: How Facebook is Reorganizing Google’s Web

The Power of “Likes”

By Dave Kerpen, CEO of Likeable Media and author of Likeable Social Media: How to Delight Your Customers, Create an Irresistible Brand, and Be Generally Amazing on Facebook (& Other Social Networks)

I was standing in line to check in at Las Vegas’ then-trendiest hotel in town, the Aria Resort & Casino, for nearly an hour. It was June 2010, and I had just arrived after a six-hour flight from New York. The last thing I wanted to do was waste an hour of my life waiting in line. Frustrated, I pulled out my BlackBerry and tweeted, “No Vegas hotel could be worth this long wait. Over an hour to check in at the Aria!”

Interestingly enough, the Aria didn’t tweet back to me, but a competitor did. I saw a tweet from the Rio Hotel & Casino just two minutes later. If you’re anything like most people with whom I’ve shared this story, you’re probably thinking, “What did the Rio tweet, ‘Come on over—we have no line.’?”

Had the Rio tweeted such a message, I would have likely felt annoyed by them, too, as if they were stalkers or some creepy characters looking to manipulate me and benefit from my bad experience. On the contrary, however, the Rio tweeted the following to me: “Sorry about the bad experience, Dave. Hope the rest of your stay in Vegas goes well.”

Guess where I ended up staying the next time I went to Las Vegas?

The Rio used social media to listen and be responsive, showing a little empathy to the right person at the right time. An ad or a push marketing-like message simply wouldn’t have worked. But the hotel staff’s ability to listen, respond, and be empathic did. The Rio essentially earned a $600 sale from one tweet—one message that got my attention and ended up being integral in my decision as to where to stay the next time I was in the city. That would be considered an excellent ROI by anyone’s standards. But the story doesn’t end there.

Before I even arrived in Vegas for my next visit, I “liked” the Rio on Facebook by clicking the “like” button at Facebook.com/RioVegas, thereby letting my 3,500 friends—and the world at large—know of my endorsement of its customer-friendly practices.

A few months later, my friend Erin was looking for a hotel to stay at in Las Vegas over the New Year’s holiday, and I received the following message from her on Facebook: “Hey Dave, I noticed you liked the Rio’s page. Thinking about staying there for New Year’s. What do you think?” A friend’s recommendation is more powerful than any advertisement, and Erin ended up staying at the Rio as well.

Dozens of other friends have surely noticed my tweets and Facebook “likes” about the Rio and have been influenced since. So, one tweet led to one “like” on Facebook and, in fact, thousands of dollars worth of business.

It used to be that happy customers tell three people about their good experiences, and unhappy customers tell ten about their bad ones. But as my experiences with the Aria and Rio hotels demonstrate, today—thanks to social media—happy customers AND unhappy customers can tell thousands of people their feelings about a company’s service or products with just a few clicks, relying on the “like” button as a virtual endorsement. The Rio leveraged this fact to its advantage, while the Aria did not.

Posted in Advertising, BlackBerry, Customer Experience, Customers, Dave Kerpen, Facebook, Listening, ROI, Twitter | Comments Off on The Power of “Likes”

The Practical Marketing Applications of Facebook (Part 3 of 4)

By Sam Mallikarjunan, Chief Executive Officer of Mallikarjunan Media Group

Part 2

Personal Information

Interestingly, Facebook recently went through a big “scandal,” where applications such as Farmville and others may have compromised users’ IDs for some people on Facebook. Facebook’s history is fraught with concerns of privacy violations and what they’re willing to share with marketers. As a marketer who spends a lot of time trying to squeeze demographics data out of Facebook, I can assure you that gathering your personal information isn’t as easy as it sounds.

However, Facebook does allow sites and applications to request “extended permissions” to access additional personal information, such as e-mail addresses, birthdays, photos, and more. Facebook users can revoke these permissions, and for the most part, Facebook users seem very willing to grant extended permissions to applications. Again, though, you may want to build a basic and extended application that can utilize different levels of personal information. That way, users who are nervous about granting extended permissions can still register on your site.

Is there any information you’d like to gather? Birthdays? E-mail addresses? Locations?

Facebook Pages for Brands

Formerly called “fan pages,” Facebook now allows users to “like” specific brands, which connects them to the page that they’ve set up. These pages are the bread and butter of marketing on Facebook. However, they have advantages and disadvantages.

Traditionally, the consensus has been that “profiles” are for people and “pages” are for businesses. However, the functionality of Facebook has blurred those lines to a great extent, since pages and profiles each have unique features.

Users can “like” your page, and the information that you can gather about them is very limited. Your connection is also fairly limited. It shares some of the same features as profile pages, such as the ability to share photos, post status updates, share links, etc. It has some very unique advantages as well. It has a fairly robust reporting system, which gives interesting information on demographics. It also has the feature of FBML (Facebook Markup Language), which allows you to code custom HTML landing pages. This is very useful for creating vivid landing pages to capture e-mail addresses, show off special offers, and anything else you can imagine in HTML.

Facebook also has a very interesting pay-per-click (PPC) advertising system with which you can advertise your page. Also, users can “like” it with a single click. This is fantastic for getting off the ground and building more fans. In also has a very unique target system. Since Facebook’s PPC ad system is technically paid traffic, I don’t classify that exactly as social media marketing, and we’ll have to discuss that in its own article.

Do you want scale of interaction or quality? If you have hundreds of thousands of consumers to connect with, consider a page.

Part 4

Posted in Advertising, Demographics, Facebook, FBML, HTML, Interaction, Marketing, PPC, Privacy, Sam Mallikarjunan, Scalability | Comments Off on The Practical Marketing Applications of Facebook (Part 3 of 4)

How Social Networks Help Us Choose

By Berenice Ring, Professor at Fundação Getulio Vargas

Have you noticed how many decisions we need to make nowadays and the amount of details involved in each one? Surely life was much easier in the early 20th century, when consumer staples were sold in bulk and housewives had their goods chosen for them by the shopkeeper, whom they relied on and trusted.

If you wanted to buy a car in 1915, the choice was quite simple. The only automaker was Ford—who had introduced the assembly line—and the options boiled down to one model, the Model T. In 1987, Brazilian consumers could choose automobiles from six makers: Ford, Volkswagen, Fiat, GM, Gurgel, and Toyota. By 2008, 36 car manufacturers offered their vehicles, exponentially increasing our options.

A 1991 supermarket offered 15,000 items; today, in the same store, we find almost 50,000—including 100 types of yogurt and 200 models of mobile phones!

However, abundance of choices does not necessarily mean better decisions. As psychologist and professor Barry Schwartz points out in his wonderful book, The Paradox of Choice, the huge amount of options adds excessive strain to the decision-making process, causing exhaustion and discouragement. Furthermore, making one choice means relinquishing all other options, so that your preferred alternative seems less appealing and even elicits a sense of loss.

Until recently, people counteracted this frustration by consulting other people they trusted. But today, our world has become an ocean of information. For instance, if you’re planning a honeymoon trip to New York City, sites like TripAdvisor will provide complete information on virtually every hotel in the city. For example, if you decide to spend your hard-earned money on a wedding night at The Pierre, the famous hotel featured in several movies, you can read online comments by the site’s user community, ranging from “Great hotel!” to “Disappointing.” It is a huge benefit to get recommendations not only from your travel agent but from people who have stayed there recently. And upon your return, if you invite friends over for dinner, you can visit Epicurious on Facebook to find recipes, or you can search Twitter using the hashtag #recipes to find plentiful tips from users.

Some brands have grasped this new trend and offer their customers a dedicated section for comments and criticism, such as My Kmart and MySears Community. Other sites were specifically founded upon this trend, such as byMK and Polyvore, which allow users to express themselves.

The penetration of social networks today is amazing. A recent survey shows that 90% of respondents know at least one—and on average, four—social network websites. Facebook is the best example, of course, with more than 500 million users and countless communities. And if you want to find customer reviews of New York restaurants, the American site Yelp lists 12,000-plus establishments—not to mention more than 7,000 stores—along with user reviews of dentists, architects, and even surgeons.

As a Nielsen study confirms, “Recommendations by personal acquaintances and opinions posted by consumers online are the most trusted forms of advertising globally.” The study of 25,000 Internet consumers in 50 countries shows that nine in ten people trust recommendations of people they know, and seven in ten trust online recommendations from strangers.

In this scenario, a good social media strategy can do wonders for a brand in terms engaging its audiences. Can the brand help consumers make better choices or play the role of an early 20th century “shopkeeper” whom its customers trust and rely on? Are brands making the best of this tremendous opportunity?

Posted in Advertising, B2C, Berenice Ring, Choices, Community, Consumer Reviews, Customers, Engagement, Facebook, Ford, Hashtags, Marketing, Networking, Retail, Strategy, Trust, Twitter, Yelp | Comments Off on How Social Networks Help Us Choose

The Online Newsroom: The Factory that Runs a Brand’s Content Engine

By Ed Lallo, Principal at Newsroom Ink

Google your company’s name and see what comes up. Do the stories at the top of the search results reflect the business you’re running? If not, why not? Maybe it’s because your company has a better story to tell than is currently being told.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google have changed the playing field for integrated marketing communications. What has not changed is the need for companies, organizations, and even politicians to communicate their stories from a unique perspective that only they can offer.

Social-integrated marketing communications offers an ever-increasing amount of tools to connect with targeted markets, but what has been lacking is a centralized content engine that drives conversation and integrates the elements of the promotional mix of advertising, public relations, direct marketing, and sales.

The online newsroom is the factory that runs a brand’s content engine. It’s the place to address brand issues, public relations, crisis management, marketing, and communications—all aligned with the CEO’s agenda. It’s the one place that consumers, vendors, and employees—as well as local, national, and international media—can obtain stories, photos, and videos told from your unique perspective, 24 hours per day.

But an online newsroom can be much more than just a newsroom. It can become the “landing site” for the social media efforts of companies, organizations, and political campaigns. The online newsroom translates your corporate agenda into a compelling story that the press, your customers, employees, vendors, and stakeholders want to read, learn more about, believe in, and contribute to on a regular basis. Using a proven model that delivers timely and influential news, the newsroom becomes an indispensable tool for a brand’s communications program.

A recent study of online newsrooms by the Corporate Executive Board—a member network of the world’s leading executives that spans more than 50 countries and represents more than 85% of Fortune 500 corporations—showed online newsrooms to be the top channel for disseminating information and effectively telling a company’s story.

Dynamic online newsrooms are not about pushing the company agenda from the top down, but instead letting the voices of others tell your story in a way that increases the credibility of your company’s brand. This “corporate journalism” style adds balance and influence and gives your brand a unique distinction.

With cutbacks in budgets, staff, and resources, print, broadcast, and digital media have turned to online newsrooms to obtain information and story ideas. According to the 2009 Journalist Survey on Media Relations Practices conducted by online public relations site Bulldog Reporter, “Public relations practitioners should shift their energies to online newsrooms, blogs, and social media,” and “journalists’ usage of these technologies continues to increase.”

Most importantly, online newsroom results are measurable. A recent study for the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board by Cision, a leading media tracking firm, found that for a three-month period, media exposure of Louisiana had reached an estimated audience of more than 3.4 billion in the United States. The Board used the online newsroom as the content engine, supported by traditional PR, Twitter, and Facebook.

Turning the online newsroom into a landing site for social media creates a centralized place to openly engage audiences, tell your brand’s many stories, and paint a picture of the uniqueness of your organization. It is like inviting someone into your house so they can see everything at a glance, and at the same time, putting the CEO’s agenda in the middle of the news.

Posted in Advertising, Blogs, Branding, Content, Crisis Management, Ed Lallo, Engagement, Exclusive Content, Facebook, Google, Integrated Marketing, Journalism, Marketing, Measurement, Newsroom, Photos, Public Relations, Sales, Tools, Twitter, Video, YouTube | Comments Off on The Online Newsroom: The Factory that Runs a Brand’s Content Engine

A CIO Takes On CMOs and Social Media Marketing

By Colin Osburn, Chief Information Officer at Parts.com

As a technologist, most everything I do has a technical bent first, with true ROI close behind. I realize that technology and finance to a marketer are like sunlight to a vampire, but steadily more and more of the marketing types appear to be following the technical and ROI trend. Metrics, reporting, automation, and justifying that mind-numbing campaign are all things that marketers are doing presently, while showing true technical aptitude.

I’ve had a real taste of why marketing and I are such distanced bedfellows. Running a national automotive parts Web site is complicated. A lot of technical effort goes into the operation and improvement of our search function, images, text, etc. Our customer base is earned through large partnerships, SEO (technical in its automation), and complimentary business lines. We even launched a short-run TV commercial this year for the first time in the company’s history.

It’s readily apparent that everyone—from small businesses to mega corporations and all the MLM shills in between—is jumping on the “new wave of technology” known as social media. To any decent technologist, this “new wave” is the same stuff we’ve been working with for years, but it’s in a new box with a bow.

All manner of Internet black magic that I can find, I heap upon our willing CTO to do a test run. I’m always looking at the newest technology for application to our business model. Automated sharing toolbars and widgets? Yep. Banner ads? Of course. Social media? Absolutely.

But I should have mentioned we do not have a CMO on staff. (Either that, or I disabled his account and forgot about him.) That means the technologists and sales executives are running the show. That also means we got exactly the results from all of these new implementations that you would expect:

  • The banner ads are completely pointless. I intend to remove them.
  • The toolbar never gets used, and no one shares anything.
  • The forums are dead.
  • We get very little response from our e-mail blasts.
  • We keep Facebook and Twitter because they keep the brand public. We also keep them because it’s a new type of customer service.

The Parts.com site is designed for commerce. We make money when someone buys an auto part. Pretty direct. We haven’t added articles and sticky reading-style content because our user base comes to our site for a very direct task and wants to do it quickly. The same people most likely do participate in auto enthusiast forums and spend a lot of time browsing “car porn” (photos of hot rods, tricked-out cars, and classic vehicles), but not while they’re buying a part. We also have a disproportionately large number of auto dealers who use our site, and the service manager isn’t interested in reading something while trying to get the customer’s part overnighted.

We have Facebook. We have Twitter. But I refuse to attach our brand to MySpace. We have hundreds of friends, and there are a lot of people talking about a lot of things, 99% of which involves the buying and selling of cars. It’s pretty damn hard to get people hot and bothered about a camshaft replacement or that hot new discounted windshield replacement. Have you figured it out yet? We’re not just commerce, but commerce as a subsection of a larger vertical. And that vertical has plenty of content and places that provide it. So we implement what we can as fast as we can and tweak, wait, watch, and adjust.

In reality, some key points came to light for me over the past year:

  • CIOs and CMOs need one another. That’s so painful to admit.
  • Marketing helps those awesome new technologies become ubiquitous.
  • If you don’t have a marketer on staff, this is a good time to start talking to your network.
  • Technology for technology’s sake works some of the time, but not enough to generate an ROI that keeps the monthly revenue high.
  • Content sites will almost always make more on the items I listed, from social media to banner ads. Commerce sites will overall make more on a direct revenue basis. Build a widget, sell a widget.
  • Commerce sites can make progress with these social media tools, but they should not bet projections on them.
  • Being a subcategory makes you look for the “why” a lot sooner. Dell and Ford kill it on social media and “new wave” commerce sales because they are the market. We sell parts. There’s a huge difference.
  • Take what you can get. Better customer service and communication has been a real win for us with these tools, even if we don’t make millions on banner ads.
  • The Get Satisfaction site is a real winner for us because it enabled us to learn from our customers what we need to know. (Facebook has helped us with that as well.)

To be continued…

Posted in Advertising, Banner Ads, Branding, CMOs, Colin Osburn, Content, Dell, E-Mail, Facebook, Finance, Ford, Forums, Marketing, Marketing Automation, Measurement, Metrics, MySpace, ROI, SEO, Tools, TV, Twitter | Comments Off on A CIO Takes On CMOs and Social Media Marketing

Sexy Social Media and Irresistible Attraction

By David LaBonte, Author of Shiny Objects Marketing: Using Simple Human Instincts to Make Your Brand Irresistible

Social media marketing is a sexy new addition to traditional marketing formats. It bridges the gap from broadcast or print to broadband, introducing fresh access to market share. But the secret of success in this brave new world still rests on your target fingerprint. You must know what makes your product, brand, or service irresistible before social media marketing can work.

Irresistible attraction is the physiological, instinctual, or psychological appeal generated between your product and the consumer. It makes your product into a shiny object that sparkles, eliciting a spark like an arc of electricity. Subconsciously, your prospect feels that they must grab it and hold onto it; it’s just too shiny to pass by.

So how do you make your product, brand, or service irresistible? The key notion is that you are looking for your customer’s shiny object, not yours. In all my years of advertising and marketing, this is the single hardest concept to grasp. Executives have trouble putting themselves in their customer’s shoes. That’s why advertising agencies exist outside of the corporate culture. They ask the dumb questions that lead to revelations.

Three simple steps will lead you to a clear definition of your customer’s shiny objects, the source of irresistible attraction.

  • First, list your customer’s shiny objects. What attracts them? What are the “must haves” that are irresistible? Be thorough during this step. It is critical to get every shiny object onto the whiteboard. There is often a hidden gem that, if overlooked, can leave a black hole in your marketing efforts.
  • Second, divide these shiny objects into features, benefits, and needs. This makes it easier to determine what motivates your prospects to reach into their pockets and exchange money for product.
  • Third, determine factors that fuel desire. Usually, they fall into one of five categories: critical to sustaining life, vital to my protection, important to my being accepted, crucial for my self esteem, and important to make life rewarding.

Finally, compare the shiny objects of your customers to your product, brand, or service. What fits? Where does your brand, product, or service dovetail with their wants and needs? How can you generate an irresistible attraction? Apply what you have learned and voila, your product is now their shiny object.

And remember, simply finding your customers’ shiny object isn’t enough to make them a committed client. You need to apply what I call the “Five Facets of a Shiny Object:”

  1. Grab attention
  2. Create a driving curiosity
  3. Stimulate an irrepressible urge to touch
  4. Activate an emotion
  5. Demand ownership

Basing your marketing on irresistible attraction doesn’t mean that people are mindless sheep. On the contrary, it means that although they can’t control what shiny object inspires irresistible attraction, they do control which shiny objects they grab and hold onto. Be ethical. Be honest. Be creative. Make your product into your customer’s shiny object, and irresistible attraction will sell truckloads!

Posted in Advertising, Advertising Agencies, Attraction Marketing, Branding, David LaBonte, Features and Benefits, Marketing | Comments Off on Sexy Social Media and Irresistible Attraction

Integrating Social Media with Mobile Marketing

By Shelly Lipton, Chief GrownUp at GrownUp Marketing

Traditional advertising channels—including print, broadcast, and online display ads—are perfect places for prompting users to text a keyword to an advertiser’s code in order to enter a sweepstakes or receive a discount coupon. This has been the foundation of mobile marketing since its infancy, but today’s savvy marketers are beginning to realize that social networking via channels like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube can spread the word even faster and more effectively.

Mobile marketing—interactive, real-time messages sent to consumers via their mobile devices—has taken its place as the advertising world’s “third screen” (in addition to television and computer monitors), and the promotional potential is unlimited. With mobile’s appealing “act now” incentives, consumers can do most of the legwork by sharing the information with their friends via their social media networks to enable an advertiser’s mobile campaign to go viral.

Here’s a sample scenario of how it might work: A national pizza chain launches a mobile marketing campaign to offer a “buy one, get one free” coupon. The company is already running TV spots and targeted online display ads to drive awareness and interest in the promotion. With the help of its ad agency, a message will be added to the TV spot that says, “Text TWOPIZZAS to code 74642 to receive a two-for-one coupon for a large pizza!” Consumers who see these ads will text the keyword and receive, via their cell phones, a digital coupon that can be redeemed at the local pizza store in their area.

Here’s where social media comes into the mix. If it’s a strong enough offer, a consumer will tell his or her friends on Facebook and Twitter that the local pizza place is offering a great deal. Those friends will tell their friends, and so on. They’ll all end up on the pizza place’s Facebook page, where they can find other share-worthy discount coupons.

According to a March 2010 article in Mobile Marketer, access to Facebook via mobile browsers grew 112 percent in the past year, while Twitter experienced a 347 percent jump, according to research by comScore. In the same article, comScore’s Director of Industry Analysis Andrew Lipsman was quoted as saying, “I think the key finding is that there appears to be a natural synergy between social media and the mobile platform. That we’ve seen such dramatic growth on Facebook and Twitter via mobile browsers is testament to this fact.”

It’s clear to both experts and observers that mobile marketing and social media are growing up together. Millennial Media’s S.M.A.R.T. Report for April 2010 revealed that social media represents 11 percent of all campaign actions on its network. And according to eMarketer in March 2010, 650 million people globally are using their smartphones for tasks such as e-mail and social networking.

With purchases of goods and services via mobile devices expected to reach $200 billion in 2012 (double what it is today), the linking of mobile marketing and social media is a marriage made on Madison Avenue.

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