In my professional development, before being an employee with SGC, I joined a local organization called Ad 2 West Michigan; in a year I was elected to the role of Chair of Public Service, where I have worked with my friend and professional club associate Ray Cashbaugh (Chair of Creative), as well as the handful of dedicated, to build our charity campaign for the Wealthy Theatre (located in East Grand Rapids).

Ad 2, a division of the AAF (National), is a club for young professionals in Advertising, Marketing, and Public Relations between the ages of 18 and 32. In light of my involvement, I had planned to join the AAF and Ad 2 for their National Conference in Orlando, Florida, as a representative of Ad 2 West Michigan even before my employment with Steketee Greiner; imagine my pride to represent not only Ad 2 West Michigan, but also a rapidly growing company driven by an innovative spirit. The passion I have for my relationship to SGC allowed me to network with professionals in the Advertising industry with a vigor that perhaps Seth Godin would be proud of.

At the conference, my already deep respect for the AAF’s role in my industry grew as I saw the number of clubs that had come to represent not only their industry, but also their hometowns, in an effort to learn, network and most importantly, have fun! On the young professional side, I was awed that leadership flew in from cities such as Denver; Washington DC; San Francisco; Madison and even as far away as Honolulu, Hawaii to support the conference for Ad 2.

During the week, one speaking engagement stuck out as specifically motivating. Gary Ware, an Ad 2 member and professional from the San Diego area (Ad 2 SD) led a workshop on how to use Social Media effectively for a club and graciously allowed me to attend (I even offered to Live Tweet with the #aafconference Hashtags). As a professional engaged in the emerging industries related to digital communications and Social Media I found that Gary and I had much in common with our views of Social Media. What interested me most from this talk was that Gary had inspired a room of ‘traditional’ Advertising professionals to engage both him and their peers in an attempt to learn and share successes.

Knowing the times I’ve seen advertising and thought “hey, Social Media could really help out here…” it’s fantastic to see traditional professionals looking to merge industries – even if the cutting edge hasn’t been their primary focus so far in their career.

So special thanks to Gary as well as the AAF National Conference, for reminding me that it’s not just about advertising, and it’s not just about Social Media – it’s about getting the consumer engaged with brands we promote to the extent that they are willing to not only purchase a product, but spread positive Word of Mouth (WOM) across their social channels (both offline and online). The added benefit of Social Media to a traditional advertising campaign comes from the ability to measure this WOM and determine ROI faster, and more affordably than traditional surveying alone.

For example: Tampax produced a very unusual (or is it revolutionary?) campaign about an adolescent named man named Zach who struggled with getting a period won best of show at the Addy’s; I can’t help but think that ‘Zach’s’ engagement through Social Media led him to not only win Best of Show but the loyalty of the consumers he engaged with in the digital landscape. You can view the official clip from the AAF [Here].

All in all, I’ve returned more passionate about my industry; it’s a pretty amazing world out there, and I hope to continue to share my passions around Social Media strategy, emerging technologies and Advertising (AAF/Ad 2 specifically!) in the near future.

In the meantime, don’t hold back. Love us or hate us – find us on Twitter: @stekteeegreiner.

And as always, if you’re looking to talk to us about our innovative views in this market, contact us through www.steketeegreiner.com.

Additional Links:

You can follow Gary on Twitter: @GaryWare

His Presentation is loaded  [On SlideShare]

Credits for the Tampax Campaign:

Tampax “Zack Johnson”

Agency: Leo Burnett, Chicago
WW Chief Creative Officer: Mark Tutssel
Chief Creative Officer: John Condon
Executive Creative Director: Becky Swanson
Creative Director: Dave Loew, Jon Wyville
Copywriter: Dave Loew
Art Director: Jon Wyville

Post by: Andrew Rushmore

]]> http://blog.agent-x.com/2010/06/passion-for-advertising-is-becoming-passion-for-social-media/feed/ 0 http://blog.agent-x.com/2010/03/google-fiber-initiative-update-not-a-new-report-yet-but-some-thoughts-nonetheless/ http://blog.agent-x.com/2010/03/google-fiber-initiative-update-not-a-new-report-yet-but-some-thoughts-nonetheless/#comments Fri, 19 Mar 2010 15:15:37 +0000 david http://blog.agent-x.com/?p=451 We’re receiving a number of inquiries from supporters of cities that weren’t included in our report, and the bottom line is that in order for these cities to get on the digital radar, they need to organize their approach by relevant search terms that supporters can find easily and, once connected, more effectively contribute to the campaign. That’s the value of these reports. This is an exercise in demonstrating to viewers the value of developing organized, measurable digital (and social media, etc.) campaigns in order to get the greatest value for the time and spend. The cities that tend to have a more fragmented social media approach (for example, Ann Arbor titling two separate Facebook pages “A2 Fiber” and “Ann Arbor for Google Fiber”) are making it more difficult to be heard as a single voice on a national level and are running the risk of going unnoticed. The way to get noticed beyond your local efforts is to get organized and create a unified, holistic digital/social media strategy of relevant, searchable content.

With all of that said, our next report will cast a broader net in hopes of pulling in some of the disparate Facebook pages and other digital channels that need to be included for participating cities to be accurately analyzed and ranked. We will also be including some insights along the line of what I’ve explained above.

In the meantime, thanks to everyone taking the time to comment. Please continue to contribute any data that may be relevant to our efforts and tune in late next week for the next report.

Good luck everyone, and keep the conversations going. We’ll be monitoring.

David

Wind down your Wednesday, and wind up your Word of Mouth Marketing knowledge!

Join your fellow big-brand leaders across West Michigan as we welcome – for the first time in Grand Rapids – Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA) Executive Director Kristen Smith.

Kristen will talk about how word of mouth programs are influencing today’s communications strategies and highlight WOMMA’s recommendations and education programs in response to the Federal Trade Commission’s new guidelines for word of mouth marketing.

Timely topics, and a good time!  And, the event is entirely free, thanks to local sponsors Steketee & Greiner and Co. and Amway.

Space is limited, so register today!

Where: Bistro Bella Vita
When: Wed. March 24, 5-7 pm

RSVP: Sue_Vanderlaan@amway.com

With community events for Google’s fiber initiative beginning on March 19^th and the growing level of online community involvement that’s building here in Grand Rapids, we put together the first in a series of reports measuring the digital conversations and online efforts surrounding the participating cities looking to have Google’s hyper-speed fiber communications lines installed, creating a rank of the top 10 candidate cities by share of the total conversation happening around the initiative online.

This first report ranks the aspiring cities by share of total number of mentions in conversations happening between February 15 to March 17 on digital media channels, and we’ll continue to publish reports weekly showing the collected digital efforts and rankings of the top 10 cities until Google makes its final choice.

Google has multiple factors in their decision making process, including how interested a community is in working with Google, community support, local activities, needs and resources, approved construction methods, local regulatory issues and area broadband speeds. Most participating cities assert that online interaction in their campaigns will increase the chances of favorability in their selection by Google, and we’ll be presenting the data and insights that will ultimately show how important a factor online share of voice is in the process.

The first report is available for download here. Just click on the image below. And stay tuned for additional reports in the coming weeks.

UPDATE: As we continue our research and measurement for our next report, we’ve noticed that some cities’ online efforts are being conducted around nicknames relevant to their campaigns or local communities, rather than the direct name of the city (Ann Arbor and Sarasota, we’re looking at you!). Based on this, we’re filtering at more detailed levels to make sure we’re capturing that information and reporting accurately. We invite any city involved in the initiative NOT directly using their name for their online efforts to reach out to us (either through a comment below or through our Twitter feed – @steketeegreiner) with any specific search terms to make sure that we have your city represented properly.

Thanks! David

Global Brand – We are trying to understand how we can leverage your platform to create a consistent brand experience for our customers. How can we do this?

FB – Well we have a lot of great ideas cooking around unique brand experiences and here is an agency that we are working with who can help you create one.

Global Brand – Okay.. Agency, we’re not so much interested in creative however we are interested in designing a system that enables us to easily publish content across a myriad of markets in multiple languages. Have you done this before?

Agency – Well, we have a content publishing tool that we designed that enables us to “work around” the FB system design however we have never done this for more than 8 markets or have any language translation capabilities…

Me – FB / Agency, can you elaborate on your long range tech plans for addressing the issues around multiple countries and multiple languages?

Agency – We design future functionality around what our customers ask for (my interpretation – we don’t have any plans to develop a translation engine until we have a customer that wants one)…

FB – Our goal is to create a compelling user experience for the end user and we have developed an advertising model that enables you to “micro-target” consumers. The architecture and design work is being left up to our agencies…

Agency – Yes, this is where we come in…

Global Brand – Agency, do you have experience integrated your platform with our social media platforms (i.e. Orkut, Bebo…) or across YouTube and Twitter…

Agency – Yes we have worked with Twitter and can integrate this into the content publishing tool. No to the rest….

As I’m sure we can all agree, Facebook is an extremely compelling playground for brands. With over 300MM users spanning the globe it’s clear that it is not only the dominant player in the space but that it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

This area is truly still a “white canvas” for Brands willing to take a risk and do something unique. With that being said, there are only a handful of agencies out there that have experience with it. When looking to evaluate an agency to launch your Facebook social strategy, make sure to consider the following questions.

1. How many brands have you launched FB initiatives with?

2. Do you currently have IP in the space? If so, what makes your IP (and solution) unqiue and compelling?

3. What experience do you have working across multiple Geos and multiple languages?

4. Do you have a content generation platform? If YES

5. Does your platform manage multiple permissions from multiple administrators?

6. Can it flag in-appropriate content?

7. What experience does your team have with cross integration of other US based and overseas based platforms?

8. Can you show me a functioning application that is more than a “hot link” to an outside URL?

9. Can you provide reporting and trends analysis beyond fan, friend, and links growth? How should my growth compare to other companies/competitors in my industry? What are the benchmarks?

10. Do you have a direct relationship with the social media platform? How is your development team structured?

11. After you install my solution, how much additional customization and support will be required for me to activate a campaign?

12. What business model are you working off of? If this is a license deal, what value is your technology providing me?

13. Can I get the same functionality through a free platform or another provider?

14. What makes your solution truly unique?

15. Who are your competitors?

Global Brands, like those before you who have charted new territory, have perseverance and patience.  Vet your agency partners carefully as you embark on creating a consistent brand experience across borders and languages.

Brian

Check out Judy’s “un-resolutions” for 2010 from adage.com.

Posted by Judy Shapiro on 12.29.09 @ 04:38 PM

1. I will not get seduced by any new digital marketing toy just because some industry pundit thinks it’s the coolest thing to hit the street. Nor will I believe every promise made by every new marketing technology company.
2. I will not abandon common sense in digital marketing and be blinded by digital agencies’ promises that their “new” campaigns will go viral and get millions of people engaged. I will continue to listen to my gut and if it sounds too good to be true, that’s a red flag warning I will heed.
3. I will not abandon newspaper, magazines, radio and other forms of traditional media if it is the right vehicle. No matter how sexy digital media may seem because of the perceived lower cost, I will continue to create integrated programs that weave together the best of both the traditional and digital worlds.
4. I will not give up my attachment to e-mail marketing. Sorry folks — but e-mail marketing done well drives real business results. If your e-mail campaign did not work, either you had a bad list or an inadequate call-to-action or maybe your agency did not know what they were doing.
5. I will not be fooled into thinking that the ad market is going to rebound in 2010. Nope. The ad market will continue to be buffeted by the tides of an evolving economic landscape and by consumers’ ever fickle attraction to new tech toys like mobile devices. These trends will continue to dampen ad revenue for publishers for some time to come.
6. I will not blindly follow Google as they chow down every tech industry from telecom to digital publishing in their relentless march toward digital dominance. In the process, they stifle competition and kill real innovation by companies who deserve to succeed.
7. I will not diminish my slavish devotion to data-driven marketing no matter what new platforms come out that can behaviorally target any audience any way I wish. I know, I know — the BT folks can slice and dice an audience so many ways that it makes a marketer salivate. But unless I can see, touch and feel the data, I will pass for now.
8. I will not start following every Tom, Dick and Jane to gain more Twitter followers. OK, so I only have about 185 folks following me but at least I know they read what I tweet. Quality, not quantity, is what drives social media.
9. And my final un-resolution: I will not try appear to be “30-something” (with a suitable amount of hair product) just because I love digital marketing. I know that the median age of people in digital marketing tends to be 27, but my depth in this space has yielded real-world, hard-won recognition. What you see (gray hair and all) is what you get.

SRM focuses on three areas: Engagement, Crowdsourcing and Monetization.  Social Networks offer so many fantastic features it naturally creates an engaging experience. Brand-to-fan dialogue, photos, videos, polls, custom content, etc. It is a rich tool kit for brand managers.  And, as fanbases grow, they can be mined for valuable insights.  Which name do you prefer for our new granola bar?  What feature would you like to see on our next video game?  Your fans have opinions and they want to be heard.  For most brands, the numbers are not there to be statistically significant, but it is a fast and free way to get a quick read and supplement your market research.  The real question is how do we leverage our fans to increase sales? Certainly there are tried and true options: special offers, promotions, discounts, sweepstakes, gwps, etc.  However, the risk lies in breaking the brand-to-consumer unwritten social code.  “Do not heavy sell me on my social network” or at least too much.  Social networks are not advertising channels, and fans are very leery of brands that sell rather than engage.  An exclusive offer every now and then is welcome and keeps the site valuable to the fans, but excessive promotion, especially those found in other channels, is just advertising.

So what is an ideal SRM ratio?  Certainly there are no clear rules on this, but the 80/20 rule is a great place to start.  80% of communication should be engaging content revealing more brand insights and drawing the fans in closer. The remaining 20% should align with the brand value.  I’ve seen a large discount retailer provide numerous promotions and offers on their site and judging by the extensive comments, it is very well received.  It aligns with the low-cost value offering and it is what their fans expect.  Obviously premium brands would take a different approach.  To start, I recommend an 80/10/10 content platform then let the testing begin.

Social media is evolving so quickly, the industry is still determining the best practices to take advantage.  We take what we know and evolve, test and mold into actionable strategies for today’s social business environment.  If you don’t have a clear SRM strategy for your brand’s social presence the 80/10/10 Engagement, Crowdsourcing, Monetization ratio is a good place to start.

Question: In this developing world of social media and digital marketing, we all know that we need to reconsider the way we’re delivering content to our audiences, but do you feel like you have things under control? There are threads everywhere discussing how we’re losing control of the conversations going on around our brands and how we’ve entered into the age of transparency in messaging. The rage today seems to be around monitoring and measuring and conducting damage assessment and control once a conversation is made public. But let’s consider content in the context of measuring and monitoring and think about how brands can move from “reactive content victim” to “proactive participant in a meaningful conversation.”

So then, how are you developing content in the new media age? How are you planning to update all the social media channels and blog(s) your company is launching, or has already launched over the course of the year? These are big questions, and unless you know the answers to them, you may want to consider scaling your digital media plan to accommodate your ability to create content that will effectively represent your brand effectively in a two-way conversation with your audiences. The key word there is “two-way,” because you’re entering an environment that is built on networks and opinions and transparency, and if you’re merely in a position to launch messaging (even if you’ve spent millions of dollars testing its relevance) into the digital space without being able to measure its effectiveness and, more importantly, without having a strategy on how to respond if a conversation erupts around your thought, you’re leaving yourself vulnerable.

As we get into it, here’s a little background on where we are and where we’re heading:

Web 2.0 has enabled a two-way dialogue. Audiences have become “search savvy,” information flows and, most importantly, the line between professional and amateur content has started to blur. The challenge isn’t finding information, it’s knowing what to do with it…

The new age of Web 3.0 is about semantics. It’s enabling a new distribution relationship around content/data centered around Filtering (information and content) and Context (delivering the right message, at the right time, to the right person, with the right device). This approach to content is creating an open source social structure that will allow databases to talk to each other and encourage social network content that urges audiences to use snippets of content as they please and where they please to reach new levels of meaning between brands and audiences.

These changes are creating a MARKETING STRATEGY SHIFT…

Web 2.0 asked us to build massive sites and drive traffic to a place where we could try to control messaging. Web 3.0 is asking us to create content that can travel throughout the digital world via conversations with multiple participants, creating connections that drive content consumption, data collection and new content generation.

So, here’s the rub, and it’s a simple “if/then” proposition: if we’re now in a position that requires us to create content that will enable and respond to conversations about our brand, then how do we generate content plans that aren’t simply focused on feeding information and stories out to audiences, trusting in their ability to run with it? The answer’s simple: plan. Build a plan that maps out your entire content strategy across all your channels for the entire year. Of course, you need to leave some room to be reactive, but if your marketing plans are aligned with your business objectives, you should be able to create a conversation that you can feed to your audiences and interact with in an organized, ongoing basis throughout the year. And if you do this well, you’ll be able to measure not only the sentiment of what’s going on around your brand, but also the effectiveness of your content (for good or bad). Once you know that, you can create a content baseline that allows you to generate planned, targeted content year after year that is valued internally for its measurable effectiveness and externally for your contributions as the subject matter expert around your brand.

We all know the importance of viral communications in today’s world. We’re learning even more about it during the WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) Summit this week in Las Vegas.

The WOMMA Summit is featuring brand speakers that discuss their real world WOM marketing programs from some of the top companies in the world.  They are presenting case studies and educating the audience on the importance of word of mouth and how it relates to their company.

We have been working on some great projects involving word of mouth tactics, one of which is a corporate blogger event.  What a great way to spur the spread of conversation about your brand.  Get people that are passionate about something and give them your brand experience to inspire them to write about it and share it with all their followers -word of mouth!

We’ve met some great people and have seen some amazing presentations here at WOMMA.  Tune in with us… Just go to womma.org and sign up for the live feed to see what the speakers have to say…and spread the word!

Google shows some of the most creative campaigns and projects that help expand our knowledge of what is possible, while inspiring us to create a more meaningful experience for the consumer.

Check it out.

87 cool things, even a few from us