#40 The Future of Marketing is...Social.

Audiences today do not want to be talked at. They want to be engaged in conversation. Social media gives us the power to do this, allowing us to define and control our brand. There is a shift from corporations and institutions to individuals and communities. Here are a few tips to take advantage of social media.

• Facebook. To help spread the word about a new campaign, why not ask employees to change their Facebook status to announce your latest campaign? If you have 20,000 employees, most likely 10,000 of them have Facebook. With the average person having 100 friends, your announcement could receive over 1 million impressions for free. Ask employees to include their LinkedIn Profiles – now you have 2 million impressions for free


• YouTube. Create a YouTube channel dedicated to teaching people more about your industry. This channel would feature a series of short, focused videos that educate your audience on related topics that help position you as an industry expert. The videos could highlight benefits and features of your products.


• Twitter. To help build and establish your company as an industry expert, top executives should create Twitter accounts to help position your company’s executives as thought leaders in the industry. Tweets should be business-related topics that talk about industry trends and forecasts. Zappos CEO has 1.6 million followers and is following almost 400K people. A total of 430 Zappos Employees have Twitter accounts. This presence helps Zappos engage and participate in conversations about their company.


• Flickr. Flickr is a great way to help promote events that your company sponsors. Photos can be optimized to show up in search results and increase brand awareness. Using Flickr to increase branding opportunities for KeyBank’s sponsorship of a 10K race, the Key “Bank to Bay” gallery has alone received 6,000 views following the event.

W6M: People visit social media sites every day, why not join them in what they are already doing?

#32 Talk and listen to your customers

From the past to the future, Best Buy CMO Barry Judge tells the story of how Best Buy's Marketing Capability talks (and listens) to its customers.

W6M: Digital is going to play a big role, but I am all about comprehensive campaigns. Some highlights from this video include:

• Talk with your clients, not to them
• Create an experience in stores, show them what they can do with your products
• Transparency builds trust
• Encourage employees to talk about their jobs

#20 Social Media Map

Social media are the means for any person to: publish digital creative content; provide and obtain real-time feedback via on-line discussions, commentary, and evaluations; and incorporate changes or corrections to the original content.

W6M: A number of my posts talk about social media (YouTube, Facebook, Blogs, etc.). When I found this Social Media Map created by Overdrive Interactive, I thought I would include it for reference.

• When you create a viral video, the first site you think about uploading your video to is YouTube. But there are a dozen more Top Tier sites that you shoud also submit your video to.
• When you optimizing your site, people typically focus on Yahoo, Google and MSN. There are again a dozen more Top Tier sites that you should also try to get listed on. Your competition may be duking it out on Google, which would allow you to take over ask.com or dogpile.com.
• When you think Social Media, you want to create videos, get ranked on the search engines, blog, wiki and podcast. Try to take advantage of these and figure out what works best for you.

My advice would be to not focus on a single area or site, but get listed on as many possible.

#16 Bank to Bay - Multichannel Communication

In 2000, KeyBank and the City of Tacoma partnered up to develop 10k/5k Run called Bank to Bay as a means to showcase the growth and development of downtown Tacoma and to promote good health, family fun, and community spirit. Key asked us to develop the marketing materials for this race which included print, radio, TV, online, direct mail, in-store merchandising, street banners, race signage and more.

This race has been an extremely popular event in the City of Tacoma. Over the past several years, race entrants has been steady around 1,800 runners. With the addition of a website and a MySpace page this year, we were able to increase entrants to over 2,000 runners. This was a substantial increase for us that we look to build on next year.

W6M: I included this example because Bank to Bay is a great example of an integrated campaign using multiple marketing channels. As mentioned above, we reach our audience through a variety of marketing channels. We realized that our print, radio and TV communications have reached as many people as we could. We now needed to try other mediums to help increase the number of runners for the race. I feel that a successful campaign should incorporate a consistent message, consistent design, frequency of message and multiple channels. You don't need to own each channel.

How do we plan to continue marketing the race?
Traditional marketing (print, radio and TV) will remain constant, however we would like to promote stronger online by adding a FaceBook page and seeding the site on related sites. The objective behind seeding is to find related running sites and have them link to your site (offering them a reciprocal link is always a nice gesture). If you do a quick search on Google you can currently see who links to your site. Your goal is to make sure people who already link to you have your updated info and to figure out who else should be linking to your site.

About the Design
I also wanted to take this opportunity to mention a little about the design. Our agency has been involved with this race for 8 years now. The challenge is to come up with something new and fresh each year. We also have to keep in mind that the race is for professional runners, as well as first time runners and families with kids. Creatively we have to make sure the design is appealing to all audiences.

The website is also challenging because we don't want to have to do a complete redesign each year. We have therefore designed the site so color bars and photos can be easily updated each year to be consistent with the design of new materials each year.

#7 The 2008 Presidential Election Goes Viral

The election has come and gone. The results are in and Obama crushed the web. From the Obama Sneaker to the Obama Girl he was every where. One of the founders of Facebook teamed up with Obama to help spread the word online. I am guessing that like me, about 100 of your Facebook friends posted this on their profile status:

W6M is the 1,357,978th person to donate their status to get out the vote for Barack Obama today. Donate yours: causes.com/election.

Whoever was in charge of online for McCain, was a little less successful. I did not see one McCain comment on anyone's Facebook page. However, I did see some great SNL skits and a few great photoshopped images of Palin.

W6M: Try to take advantage of all mediums. Print and TV advertising is great mass marketing, but niche marketing on Facebook, YouTube, blogs and other areas is a great opportunity to reach a highly targeted audience.

If there are any politicians reading this, feel free to steal this idea. Start A Blog. People don't really know what you do all day and what types of decisions you have to make. Tell me what decisions you are making and why. Even you have to make a decision on my behalf just tell me you voted this way because and I will vote for you the next time. Politics has too many smoke and mirrors, how about some transparency and honesty?

#2 Cleveland Stands Together Against Neighborhood Crime Everyday (STANCE)

We recently launched a branding campaign called Standing Together Against Neighborhood Crime Everyday (STANCE), which is aimed at reducing gangs in Cleveland. If you are familiar with DARE the anti-drug campaign, STANCE is similar, but the anti-gang counterpart.

Troy Smith and Ted Ginn, Sr. were the first two spokesmen to team up with STANCE. They are featured in print, radio and TV. The campaign is anchored around www.ClevelandStance.com/ where people can get more info about preventing gangs.

One really vital part of the campaign for us was the development of our Facebook page. Three weeks after launching the site, we had over 550 friends. Feedback has been very positive and it turns out Facebook has been an effective tool for reaching our audience.

W6M: This has been an extremely fun campaign to work on. When you have a chance to work on a pro-bono client, take advantage of your chance to do cool creative. This is a chance to build your portfolio, meet some celebs and perhaps experiment with new marketing mediums. We have attempted to promote on MySpace before with a decent response, but we have been extremly successful with promoting Stance on Facebook. Careful though not to request too many friends at one time or they may block you as a Spammer.