There’s an article in Crain’s New York Business (CrainsNewYok.com) about the food truck vendors in NYC who are now using Twitter each morning to notify their loyal customers of their daily location and arrival time. This strikes me as a wonderful use of Twitter. Check out the article online at http://tinyurl.com/me89px.
The article by Lisa Fickenscher, goes on to say: “Over the past couple of years, the number of food trucks peddling gourmet fare in the city has exploded, with many of them relying on Twitter to build up loyal followings. There are at least 10 such trucks that twitter, according to Web site Serious Eats.” (Source: Lisa Fickenscher, Crain’s New York Business, July 1, 2009)
“Robert Arbor, who drives Le Gamin truck with its offerings of sandwiches and crêpes, started twittering in March and now has 700 followers.
While he has given up his blog—“I don’t have time,” he says—it is time-effective for him to send out tweets about the truck’s latest location or its specials of the day.” (Source: Lisa Fickenscher, Crain’s New York Business, July 1, 2009)
Meanwhile, NYC is preparing for Restaurant Week (July 12-31) and has an advertising agency hard at work designing a Twitter promotion to drive consumers to make early reservations throughout the promotional period. Tweats will include exclusive benefits/offers only available through Twitter.
As a marketing strategy, the idea of routinely committing random acts of generosity may not be something that has occurred to you. When I was in Starbucks this morning, my friends behind the counter told me that my lattes were on the house. There was no special reason or occasion to warrant this action. They just did it. And I appreciated it. Heck, I’m writing about it in my blog.
This reminded me of an article a colleague passed along to me from the New York Times Magazine on June 21, 2009. The article by Rob Walker was titled “Favor Enhancement: Real gratitude can be profitable. How, then, to create it?” The article talks about how Hyatt Hotels plans to randomly do unexpectedly generous things for its guests as a marketing tactic. “The idea is that the unexpected nature of the fits will leave the customer not just pleased bu also grateful. Gratitude is a powerful, and potentially quite profitable, emotion to inspire.” (Source: NYT Magazine, June 21, 2009) You can check out the article online at http://tinyurl.com/klttwn.
For his article, Walker interviewed Robert Palmatier, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Washington and an author of an upcoming paper in the Journal of Marketing addressing the power of gratitude.
“While Palmatier says there has been a lot of research on the psychology of gratitude in the past five or six years, he points to an older study that’s now considered a classic. Participants waiting for an experiment to begin were treated in one of two ways: Some were unexpectedly given a soft drink by an assistant posing as another participant, and others were not. This seemed like an act of pure generosity on the part of a fellow participant, but it was actually part of the experiment. When the same assistant later asked subjects to buy raffle tickets, those who had been given a soda were far more likely to do so — and on average bought twice as many tickets as those who didn’t get a soda. This says something about the human animal, and Palmatier adds that other studies have found that we feel pleasure from reciprocating out of gratitude, and guilt when we don’t. This, he adds, is something a business can use to its advantage or, depending on how you look at it, exploit.” (Source: NYT Magazine, June 21, 2009)
When you’ve got a moment, check out this article online. Walker’s column is always interesting, and this one ventures into the realm of being thought provoking.
Today is the last day to get your entries in for the W3 Awards. The W3 Awards recognize outstanding websites, web advertising, and online film and video.
This April I did a presentation for the Advertising Federation of Charleston on the topic of marketing during a recession. The title of the presentation was “Big ideas for your shrinking ad budget.” The talk was part of the AdFedU series of marketing seminars for small business owners and managers. I focused on cost effective ways to get the most out of your marketing – with particular emphasis on social media. I’ve edited the presentation into a number of 10 minute segments that appear below. Enjoy!
Part 1 – Introduction: Echo Branding, Customer Service, Community Relations
Part 2 – Media Strategies in a Recession: Figure out Social Media, Listen to Customers
Part 3 – A Winning Formula; and Media Relations
Part 4 – Social Media (quick overview for small business owners)
There is a cock fight of historic proportions taking place. It’s the battle between KFC and El Pollo Loco. Evidently, KFC’s new grilled chicken contains beef ingredients, not something you’d expect to find in your grilled chicken. And El Pollo Loco is going public with the news via a new TV spot. The TV commercial can be viewed online at http://beefychicken.com.
There’s a good story in Nation’s Restaurant News that gives all the details behind the battle of the chicken titans. This is really the third skirmish in what has been a very lively exchange between El Polo Loco and KFC. You can find the article online by going to http://tinyurl.com/mvf99s. Quoting from the story:
“Throughout the chicken wars, El Pollo Loco has proclaimed its product’s more authentic grilled flavor because the chicken is cooked over a flame grill. KFC’s chicken is cooked on a grill rack in an oven.” (Source: Nation’s Restaurant News)
There are lots of places you can go online for information about creating a social media marketing plan. In a post on Mashable.com, Peter Kim presents a list of 22 social media tools to consider integrating into your plan.
(From Peter’s post) Here’s a framework of 22 tools to consider with notable brand examples:
But looking at social media tools is really putting the cart before the horse. So how do you get started with a social media marketing plan? Generally, it should follow the model of a typical marketing plan:
Identify Goals and Objectives
Market Analysis (trends, needs, competition, best practices, etc)
Social Media Program Components/Implementation (including integration with traditional campaign)
Assessment and Allocation of Resources
Monitoring and Measurement
That’s the big picture view. Now here are some more specific steps you should take when creating a social media marketing plan:
Participate - If you’re not involved in social media, get involved. Consider this remedial training! At a minimum, join Facebook, LinkedIn, and start following some industry blogs. You will find it very difficult to sell or even construct a social media marketing plan if you aren’t familiar with the functionality, strengths and weaknesses of the various platforms.
Culture/Preparedness – Start by assessing your organization’s appetite for social media? How risk averse are they? Determine the steps you will need to take to bring them along and prepare them for this venture into the world of social media. Ideally, presenting them with a well-reasoned, strategic social media marketing plan will help to make your leadership more comfortable with the idea.
Target Audience - Define your targeting audience(s) and key stakeholders
Objectives and Goals - Take each group and outline your marketing objectives related to that group (keep it simple). Examine how each group currently uses social media. Look at industry best practices and review the activities of your top competitors.
Desired Outcomes – Clearly define the outcomes your organization would like to see: brand awareness/stature, enhanced search rankings and web traffic, increased preference, and greater customer traffic. Be as specific as possible. The outcomes you desire should impact the ways in which you measure results.
Toolbox - Identify social media vehicles that help you accomplish your marketing objectives, by audience. This will become your toolbox! The vehicles you select need to take into account a number of factors including: resources available, desired outcomes, and ability to deliver your message/content. This assumes that you know the strengths of various social media platforms. (Hopefully you’ve done the earlier analysis of each group’s use of social media.) This is the step that may require the most research. For example, you may not know what LinkedIn groups reach a specific target audience, so you’ll need to get online and start digging around. Join those groups and start following the conversation. Find out what these people care about and talk about. Another example, you’ll need to identify the top bloggers/thought leaders that you will want to influence?
Integration – Define the process you will use to make sure the program is integrated with traditional marketing and branding efforts of your organization. And don’t forget about PR and media relations. There are lots of great social media tools that can make your PR program more effective. Be sure to integrate that into the plan as well. Internal communications should also be integrated into the plan.
Plan Resources – Make your program sustainable and avoid social media fatigue! You’ll need to get tactical by identifying how you’ll use the platform given the resources you have available (internal or external). A great deal of information can be re-purposed and shared within various social media platforms. So think this through carefully. You also need to define workflow – and who will do the work. And who will develop content for these various outreach mechanisms? How will information flow within your organization to the content generators? You don’t have to do everything at once. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Start small and you can always grow the program.
Measure – Determine how you will measure results. You will want to build in measurement tools.
Monitor – Develop a plan for actively monitoring social media.
Policy – Develop an ‘employee social media policy.’ You need one of these anyway, but with an increase in social media engagement by your organization, having an employee social media policy becomes more important.
Are you familiar with Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps? I’ve been loyal to this brand since the late 70’s – when it was a counterculture staple. It amazes me that it has maintained its relevance and popularity over the years. It is perhaps best known for its cluttered labels that feature the most minute lines of text, approximately 3,000 words, that reveal Dr. Bronner’s “we’re all one” philosophy.
In the 70’s, Dr. Bronner’s emphasis on purity, peace, unity, love and environment obviously were in keeping with the values of the era. They resonated with a certain segment of the population at that time. Today, many of the values that Dr. Bronner’s represents are re-emerging in the American psyche – particularly a commitment to sustainability. Dr. Bronner’s uses organic oils in its soaps; the products are 100% vegan and have not been animal tested; the plastic containers in which the soap is packaged are made from 100% post-consumer recycled plastic bottles. The company also encourages customers to refill their containers from drums or gallon jugs at retail locations. Dr. Bronner’s is also adopting fair trade practices. Because of the heightened sensitivity to green issues in America, Dr. Bronner’s is now relevant to a broader audience, no longer simply a product for hippies. Check them out online at www.drbronner.com.
One of the things I like best about Dr. Bronner’s is that they haven’t reinvented themselves to meet the changing appetite of American consumers. Rather, they have held true to their values over many decades and have let America catch up with them. This is the best kind of echo branding, where a company markets shared values. In the case of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, the values are well-established and genuine.
Now that College of Charleston’s branding campaign has been successfully rolled out, I thought I’d share it with you. In the spirit of full disclosure, my agency created and executed the campaign. We’ve also had the benefit of a wonderful client team at College of Charleston. They get it. And they chose well from the concepts we presented.
The final campaign, which we call Textures, truly captures the essence of College of Charleston. I consider College of Charleston a heritage brand. If you were to visit the campus, your experience, particularly the tour of campus, would reinforce that perception. Yet, it is an incredibly modern and relevant public University. Our campaign does its best to convey both sides of that equation.
Here are a couple of the print ads from the campaign:
And here are the very simple TV spots from the campaign. They’re simple, but convey a ton of information in an upbeat and contemporary fashion:
The campaign also uses outdoor advertising to spread the word. Billboards seem to have been very effective in driving traffic to our CofCforme microsite. Check out the microsite by clicking here. You’ll see how effectively it works with the rest of the campaign – particularly the television spots. Below are a couple of examples of the billboards from the campaign:
In all of my spare time, I’ve been reading the various texts that keep coming out about social media. The latest was Joel Comm’s Twitter Power. For me, it is getting hard to be have a balanced perspective about all of these introductory social media books. My current point of view is that most of them don’t share enough detail to be useful and only skim the surface. Think of these texts as a starting point – and little more.
Twitter Power only slightly exceeds those expectations. Like many, I’ve been slow to adopt Twitter and hoped to have this book open my eyes to all of the possibilities that it represents. As a current Twitter user, it didn’t take me as far as I had hoped. However, if you’ve never used Twitter and truly don’t get it, then this book may is for you, and may proved to be a useful tool in helping you get started. Check it out online at http://tinyurl.com/qmzwq8.
I wish the author had dedicated more space and attention to the “Beyond Twitter.com” section of the book. He touches on several of the applications that work hand-in-hand with Twitter (twitthis.com, twitPwr.com, tweetdeck.com,tweepbeep.com, etc), but gives very little detail. It is left to the reader to explore these various applications (definitely do it!).
In the end, reading about social media is okay, but you need to dig in and get involved. Experience it for yourself. Test drive the applications and platforms. And see how they work together.
Other books about Twitter? There are a ton of them. Here are a few you can find on Amazon.com:
This morning I read in MediaPost’s Marketing Daily that customers’ commitment to retail banks has decline for the third consecutive year. They were pulling information from the 2009 J.D. Power Retail Banking Satisfaction Study.
Quoting from the MediaPost Marketing Dailyarticle:
“The study finds that customer perceptions of bank brand image have declined for a third consecutive year. Low customer ratings in the areas of overall reputation, customer focus and personal service primarily drive the decrease in brand image among banks.”
It is no wonder that the consumer’s image of banks is declining in the current economic environment. However, to see that this is part of a longer trend, says something important about how banks are failing to engage and adequate service their customers. My clients in the financial industry, who I proudly mention are doing things the right way, are very much aware of this trend, and are working to take advantage of this opportunity by continuing to put their customers first and make smart business decisions – doing what is best for their customers. Truliant Federal Credit Union is a great example of a financial institution that has always put the customer/member first. It is my belief that this customer-centric model will pay big dividends. People want to know and trust that their financial institution has their best interest at heart!
And just as a footnote, if I see another “green” marketing program by a bank I’m going to scream. This is a weak attempt, usually without any substance behind it, to connect with consumers on a values level. My advice: Just say no to green marketing unless your company truly operates under a green philosophy and sustainability is one of your corporate values.
In the 70’s, Dr. Bronner’s emphasis on purity, peace, unity, love and environment obviously were in keeping with the values of the era. They resonated with a certain segment of the population at that time. Today, many of the values that Dr. Bronner’s represents are re-emerging in the American psyche – particularly a commitment to sustainability. Dr. Bronner’s uses organic oils in its soaps; the products are 100% vegan and have not been animal tested; the plastic containers in which the soap is packaged are made from 100% post-consumer recycled plastic bottles. The company also encourages customers to refill their containers from drums or gallon jugs at retail locations. Dr. Bronner’s is also adopting fair trade practices. Because of the heightened sensitivity to green issues in America, Dr. Bronner’s is now relevant to a broader audience, no longer simply a product for hippies. Check them out online at 
In all of my spare time, I’ve been reading the various texts that keep coming out about social media. The latest was Joel Comm’s 