Category: Integrated Marketing

It’s BlogHeriffic!

It’s BlogHeriffic!

BlogHer Business
It’s hard to believe that BlogHer Business ’08 is just around the corner. BlogHer, the community for women who blog, is bringing together leading social media practitioners from across industries and Ogilvy 360 DI will be there. We are sponsoring the track on Successful Social Media Creation and, with trusty videographer in tow, we’ll be interviewing attendees throughout the 2 day event.

Per the Catch Up Lady’s post here, we’d like to get your input on what we ask of the attendees. In her words, like any good 80’s movie – we need a montage! So, what would you like to ask leading female social media creators? What do you want to ask the brands who want to connect with these powerful voices? We’ll be there and we want to bring you the most valuable output possible, so let us know what you’d like to hear.

Small Business + Blogger Experiences = Gold

Small Business + Blogger Experiences = Gold

This is cross posted from Ogilvy’s 360 Digital Influence Blog.

Check out some wonderful examples of small businesses getting a boost from the blogosphere in today’s WSJ. Bean Bag chair maker Sumo Lounge International was able to work with technology uber-blog Engadget to achieve a chain reaction of business success that that $60k in trade show exhibitions hadn’t produced – getting exposure for his product with the audience that would most appreciate it. 2 years after the initial deal with Engadget, Sumo Lounge has been reviewed by 250 bloggers and has tripled profits.

The article maps tightly to our evolving Blogger Code of Ethics, but also illustrates the golden rule for blogger outreach efficacy – inviting a blogger to participate in an experience is infinitely more powerful than sending a press release. Inviting a blogger to review your product, attend a demonstration, live chat with your engineers, enter your contest, tour your headquarters, etc, is a better course for blogger outreach for 3 major reasons:

  1. An experience is something that the blogger/social media creator can capture and interpret in their own style, chosen medium, and on their own time.
  2. Experiences provide bloggers with conversational capital that they can in turn share with readers.
  3. The final benefit of inviting bloggers to participate in an experience is that, because it is more involved than sending a press release, it will force you to tightly focus on building relationships with the bloggers most relevant to your offering.

What type of remarkable experience can you offer your key constituents?

Neither Harvey Dent Nor Eliot Spitzer

Neither Harvey Dent Nor Eliot Spitzer

Yesterday, brand Husband (also my blog stringer) called in a tip from our Georgetown neighborhood that a van with Aaron Eckhart’s photo on it, and campaign signs reading “I Believe in Harvey Dent”. He suggested I check out the faux campaign website.

Harvey Dent

I then mentioned this to the Catch Up Lady who clued me in to the elaborate online program surrounding Harvey Dent’s campaign that has been tiding over moviegoers for months. I am not conversant enough with Dark Knight mythology to recognize that Harvey Dent is Gotham’s crusader DA, but Husband knew immediately that this van was all about Batman. So like, the commercials for Oceanic Air that led to a website priming the enthusiast audience for the return of Lost, Harvey Dent street teams are popping up in neighborhoods in big cities all over the country, building buzz among insiders on the grassroots level – and confusing the heck out of a lot of other people in the meantime as I Watch Stuff amusingly chronicled in NY.  This will be clutter to many, but powerful for the core few.

TwofaceMaybe the Batman movie will get a boost out of this week’s news of Client 9. After becoming the supervillain Two Face, Harvey Dent, the former crusader against police corruption flips a coin to decide whether to do evil or fight it. Maybe that’s how the former Governor of New York was setting his daily agenda too. To quote Harvey’s campaign platform “Too many cops have become criminals themselves.”

Give It Away, Now

Give It Away, Now

What we keep we lose, and only what we give remains our own” was stitched on a banner that I saw every day on my way into elementary school. At that point, it was more of a moral compass. More recently, I’ve seen it turn into sound business advice.

Harbor LightsThere is no greater assignment of personal equity than to give a product or experience as a gift. On an early date with my husband, I gave him my favorite album – thereby assigning my “VeeDub equity” to it. Always a risk – he could hate it, and the value of “VeeDub equity” could have decreased in his eyes.

Similarly, giving a customer a little piece of your brand to give away themselves (an experience invitation, a sample, a coupon, a badge, etc) is a great litmus test. Your customer will do one of 3 things, which will allow you to know how to invest in them in the future:

Ignore it – Either you chose an unappealing representation of the brand to share with them or they were never going to be an enthusiast. This individual is not one you should continue to invest in disproportionately.

Keep it for themselves – This means that they enjoy your brand, but will not share because they either do not feel like it reflects positively on their own brand equity or they do not feel comfortable sharing with others. These folks are not hubs. Continue to value their patronage, but they are not evangelists in the making.

Pass the brand along – They feel like sharing your brand reflects back positively on them and they are willing to assign their personal equity to it. Embrace these people. They are going to be a higher ROI investment than any other acquisition channel. Give them the tools & education to become evangelists.

Video Alone is NOT WOMM

Video Alone is NOT WOMM

Video alone is not Word of Mouth Marketing any more than the video of your kid’s first birthday is “viral”. Word of Mouth Marketing is a set of activities within a marketing objective that do the following:

  1. Provide a remarkable experience (in it’s literal “worthy of remark” sense)
  2. Facilitate sharing this experience – between customers, between the brand and customers, between communities, etc.

Video and video sites make video chunks of information very easy to share. The rub – and what determines whether or not a video becomes “viral” – is whether or not the video is remarkable enough to inspire sharing.

How do you become remarkable? You have to know your customers – listen to what they find remarkable now and note what topics make their radar. Then, examine your product/service/culture/offering etc and what potential sources of conversational capital you can own. After that, it’s all about making a great video, check out these guys or the Viral Video Artiste below.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/aXJVxmWTmkg" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

If you do not start the world’s next viral sensation/Word of Mouth Marketing case study, what you have is not bad. Having rich, varied, positive multimedia content on your site and tagged on video sites is indeed a critical thing in our search-driven world. If you want to develop multimedia content in the hopes of generating conversations, make the first move not by talking, but listening. If you know what your customers are talking about, you will have a much better sense of how to create relevant videos, regardless of whether or not they show up on the Today Show.