Insights for Leaders Navigating
Visibility, Credibility, and Growth.
From media strategy to reputation management, we explore the trends shaping public perception and share the approaches that drive measurable results for growing brands.
Ever thought about a museum dedicated solely to you? Intel did, and found marketing and branding gold.
Following the concept of LinkedIn’s more basic “Connection Timeline,” Intel recently released the “Museum of Me,” (MoM) in which the viewer is able to tour a virtual museum display dedicated to his or her life – or at least that which has been posted to Facebook. While LinkedIn’s “Timeline” details your LinkedIn history visually and across time, MoM quickly and easily exhibits your online social history.
Set to the music of Takagi Masakatsu, the multimedia artist recently profiled on Apple’s website, the MoM tour guides the viewer through a virtual museum of photographs, words and video clips, all drawn from the user’s Facebook data. With the purpose of displaying the muscle and might of Intel’s Core i5 processor, Intel has succeeded in creating a widespread and truly resonating marketing campaign.
Intel’s Facebook page activity skyrocketed following the June 1 release of MoM with “Likes” jumping from one million in late May to 1.3 million on June 1, currently weighing in with 1.6 million “Likes.” Additionally, well more than half a million people currently “Like” the MoM site itself. With these “Likes” distributed to more than 500,000 news feeds, the impact of MoM is enormous for Intel’s Facebook and social media presence.
What is interesting about MoM’s success is not the concept itself but the logic that drives it. The idea behind the campaign is a basic one: consumers clearly enjoy seeing information about themselves posted online. Intel made the marketing campaign about the consumer and garnered significant interest and participation. In an arena where the average consumer is constantly projecting themselves publicly via social media outlets, appealing to the consumer’s ego is increasingly pertinent.
Successful marketing is based on establishing the relevance of a marketing campaign with individuals. In our interactive world, it is possible to not only provide direct relevance to the consumer, but to involve the consumer directly and personally, the way Intel has done with MoM. They’ve made their campaign irresistible for consumers to participate in by personalizing the experience for each participant and utilizing familiar forms of online communication, such as Facebook.
Intel showed that simple, creative and interactive strategies can be useful and attractive to consumers by appealing to their own social life and interests, while still displaying a product and increasing brand awareness. This innovative strategy marks a milestone in the evolution of interactive advertising by directly involving and catering to each unique consumer. The logic behind the MoM can be applied to any marketing campaign that hopes to drive consumer involvement. Intel’s creative concept provides tremendous insight into how to successfully involve consumers in the distribution of a marketing campaign.
When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton released her book, “It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us” in 1996, it was met with rave reviews and became a modern classic. The book centers around the impact individuals and groups outside the family have, for better or worse, on a child’s well-being, and advocates for a society which meets all of a child’s needs. Much the same can be said for an organization looking to build a new category within an established industry. It takes many people including visionaries, industry analysts, partners and customers, and proven products to drive awareness and demonstrate success around an emerging category.
In a Fast Company article, Kahain Krippendorf outlines thoughts on creating a new category saying, “When a new category is created, innovators take advantage of that new niche’s competitive advantage.” So, ask yourself these questions to see if you can find a new category that you can own:
- What category does my business fit in?
- Is there a way to blend two or more categories to offer something new?
- Do I see a demand and a market that isn’t being served, and if so, how can I create a new category and gain a competitive edge?”
One of our clients, Opscode, is working to build a new category within the cloud computing and infrastructure management market called, cloud infrastructure automation. Their approach of automating infrastructure management via the cloud is changing the way enterprises tackle systems configuration enabling them to cost-effectively improve infrastructure management efficiency and quickly scale infrastructure to meet business needs.
To help elevate this shift in the industry, we worked with Opscode to develop a strategy and plan that leveraged a combination of internal survey data, customer case studies and new products to demonstrate how Opscode’s approach to cost-effectively improve infrastructure management efficiency and quickly scale its infrastructure to meet the needs of the business.
Next, we bundled three key announcements to help underscore the need for cloud infrastructure automation in the enterprise amid the widespread shift to cloud computing. These announcements included the general availability of Hosted Chef, a new product called Private Chef, and an umbrella release that outlined the key drivers behind this trend and included key proof points including survey data as well as analyst, customer and partner quotes.
We also pre-briefed media and analysts to introduce them to Opscode and garner support for the launch.
As a result of our efforts, we secured more than 20 briefings with key technology media and industry analysts such as The 451 Group, IDC, Forrester, Gartner, RedMonk and more. We also garnered more than 17 pieces of original coverage including Network World, Light Reading, Enterprise Systems Journal, ReadWriteCloud, GigaOm, SearchCloudComputing, Data Center Knowledge, among others .
We have discussed how to launch a new product in a new category, but in order for media, analysts and potential customers to get on board with a new category and help build credibility, it is critical to outline and demonstrate how the new product, approach or solution is disruptive to the existing landscape (vis-à-vis case studies, data, third-party validation, etc.).
Twitter is one of the most valued social media platforms utilized today by organizations and brands who seek to engage and interact with their target audiences. However, if you have one of the 200-plus million registered accounts on Twitter responsible for driving more than 110 million tweets per day, it can be easy to get lost in the conversations.
It is likely that in the early days of your presence on Twitter, you watched the numbers of followers quickly rise as your employees (along with their family and friends), current customers and partners all subscribed to get the latest news on your company. But have you recently reached a plateau in which you are no longer attracting new followers? Or perhaps you have seen a dip as followers choose to unfollow you?
I recently came across a useful article on SocialMediaExaminer.com that shared “4 Tips to Maximize Your Twitter Marketing.” The tips serve as a good reminder on the basics of using Twitter as part of an engagement strategy. We thought it might be helpful to highlight some of the tips shared in this article, in addition to a few other ideas we have learned through our own engagement on Twitter.
- Define your business goals and objectives. When we develop PR strategies for our clients with a social media component, we examine what we want to accomplish by using Twitter and set metrics to measure our engagement against. It’s important that this strategy closely aligns with the organization’s overall business goals and objectives. However once you have an established Twitter presence it’s always a good idea to revisit these goals one to two times a year to make sure they continue to align with your social media strategy. Additionally it’s a good idea to analyze how the community has responded, since launching your presence, as this may also help drive any changes in the strategy.
- Create your conversation strategy. Twitter is about building a community and your success thrives on the ability to form a relationship with your followers. The article suggests “thinking through your conversation strategy and put it in place before you invest time in searching for new people to follow.” At Communiqué PR, we often develop an editorial calendar to ensure we are developing content that aligns with the company’s story arc. In addition, it also allows us to evaluate if we have the right balance of company news, conversation starters and other interesting industry news.
- Organize your community with Twitter Lists. Twitter provides this functionality for a reason – to make it easier for you to focus your engagement with your followers. By breaking up a community into lists, you gain a better understanding of what they are up to and the conversations that are meaningful for them. If you are not familiar with this feature, Twitter provides a great tutorial on how to create them.
- Nurture your Twitter community. It is important to recognize that it takes time and commitment to build a community. The article makes a great recommendation to keep your engagement in perspective and to “start small and build over time” by following a handful of people each week. When we have new followers on our own Twitter channel, we often spend a few minutes to get to know each of them by reading their profile and tweet stream. It provides us with a greater sense of what type of information they value and share with their followers.
What has worked well for you when building your community on Twitter? Do you find the Twitter Lists feature helpful to engage with your community?
Adoption of social media platforms including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube has been significant, and according to CMO.com it is anticipated that “CMOs will invest more in social media this year than ever before.” Earlier this year, CMO.com launched its 2nd Annual Guide to: The Social Landscape in an effort to capture the social media landscape.
While the CMO.com guide offers tips on nine social media platforms, new platforms continue to emerge and attract attention and members everyday such as Quora, Empire Avenue and Ning. For a complete list of active social media networking sites check out Wikipedia – but be ready, the list is extensive. It is easy to reach platform overload.
For most marketing professionals, the social media platforms with hundreds of millions of active members continue to draw the majority of their resources and attention, and the benefits of even the most popular networks differ greatly. Just last week, we wrote about how LinkedIn compares to several other networks and outlined the different pros and cons (The Value of LinkedIn vs. Other Social Media Networks).
Clearly, as communicators, we need to stay up to speed on these new platforms and understand which networks will be most effective and efficient in reaching our target audiences in order to support an organization’s business objectives. Is the best platform the one with the largest number of active members? Or is there a niche platform that may not have reached the masses yet, but specifically caters to a critical target demographic?
Ironically, we utilize some of these same social networks to stay informed of new entrants. We also look to resources such as Mashable, TechCrunch, Soshable, and Social Media Examiner to become aware of changes in the landscape.
How do you stay up on the changing social media scene? What platforms are you investing in today?
Cause marketing campaigns can be an effective way for companies to engage with customers and encourage them to feel emotionally connected to a particular product or service. The value of these types of campaigns can not only help win new customers and build customer loyalty, but also increase awareness and sales of product.
According to Wikipedia, “cause marketing or cause-related marketing refers to a type of marketing involving the cooperative efforts of a “for-profit” business and a nonprofit organization for mutual benefit.”
There have been countless (and memorable) examples of cause marketing campaigns including:
- Yoplait packaged specific products with pink lids as part of its “Save Lids to Save Lives” campaign in support of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure. For each lid that consumers turned in, the company donated 10 cents to the organization.
- Cheerios teamed up with the American Heart Association to secure its stamp of approval on its products to help promote the fact that Cheerios met the Associations’ low-fat, low-cholesterol standards.
- Product Red, one the largest cause-related marketing campaigns ever created included participation from some of the most well-known brands to support The Global Fund to Fight AIDS. Created by Bono to engage the private sector in raising awareness and funds to help eliminate AIDS in Africa, Product Red included a series of campaigns with companies such as Apple, Nike, Motorola, Starbucks and The Gap.
- Back in 1983 American Express launched a campaign to help raise money for the Statue of Liberty Restoration project. A penny for each use of the American Express card, and a dollar for each new card issued were given to the Statue of Liberty renovation program.
So how do you determine which cause or organization makes most sense to partner with to launch a mutually beneficial campaign? Consider the following tips by Kim Gordon, who recently wrote an article “How to Start a Cause Marketing Campaign,” for Entrepreneur:
- Designate a product and donate a portion of its sales to charity. Also known as passive customer participation, helping a nonprofit this way is possibly the easiest and fastest way to jump into cause-marketing. It’s essential to choose an organization your target audience will value and want to support. It can be a national nonprofit — such as one that funds cancer research or cleans up the environment — or a local charity.
- Create and sell a symbolic item. This strategy asks the customer to take an active role in the giving process, and requires a more aggressive public relations and advertising campaign. It involves creating and marketing an item that allows customers to physically demonstrate their support for a designated cause. This can be an item they wear or carry, such as a tote bag, T-shirt or bracelet emblazoned with a supportive and inspiring message.
- Sponsor a special event. If you’re looking for a high-profile way to support a cause, then creating a fundraising event could be the best strategy. Traditional events include everything from 10K runs and bike-a-thons to banquets. Keep in mind, the more creative you are with these events, the better your results are likely to be.
- Provide grassroots help. One tried-and-true strategy for lower-profile corporate giving is to donate staff time to make a difference in your community at the grassroots level. It’s smart to align your giving with your company’s primary business. This will not only aid the nonprofit you choose, but also help your customers remember what your company stands for. For example, each store in the Whole Foods Market chain donates food to local food banks and shelters and holds community giving days during which five percent of net sales are donated to a local nonprofit.
Once you have a cause marketing campaign in place, PR and social media can be a terrific way to get the word out and encourage engagement. This could include a combination of traditional and online media relations tactics such as a press release, buddy e-mail, and/or developing a calendar of tweets and Facebook posts.
Have you launched a successful cause marketing campaign? We want to hear about it! Leave a comment or send us an email.
In case you missed it, there was study released today by ROI Research, Inc. stating that users think it’s more important to have a LinkedIn account than any other type of network. The news got me thinking about my use of social media and what constitutes as value around social media.
I agree for professional use, LinkedIn is extremely valuable. We are currently recruiting for an account manager or account director, and I have spent significant time on LinkedIn perusing professional’s backgrounds, looking at the comments others have posted about them and examining individuals’ experience. We also have found LinkedIn to be a wonderful way to advertise positions.
Nonetheless, I would be hard pressed to say LinkedIn is more valuable than Facebook or Twitter. With Facebook, I have been able to connect with people on a more personal or social manner. I have re-connected with long-lost relatives and college friends who have moved half way around the world.
Twitter also serves a unique purpose in my personal and professional life. I use it to find out about breaking news, solicit information or opinions, or find out what is trending around the world.
Just like there are different TV networks or channels devoted to specific content such as drama, sports or news, the different social networks serve unique purposes in our lives and I don’t think you can say one is more important than another.