Listening as marketing - it’s becoming a weekly theme around here.

Yet another big brand is exploring new ways to leverage social media tools to better listen to their customers: Intel is launching ITopia next week. ITopia is designed to enable IT professionals to talk directly with Intel engineers and will also include community sites for IT pros to connect directly with each other.

Continue reading "Intel Gets Social with ITopia"

David Pogue of The New York Times wrote about a recent conference where attendees were asked why they weren’t taking advantage of Web 2.0. The responses were not out of the ordinary:

The audience loved that one; within seconds, there were 132 responses on the screen in a huge, scrolling list. “Not enough money.” “Don’t understand it.” “No technical resources.” “Not enough manpower.” “No visible return on investment.” “Fear of ridicule.” “Fear of slander.” “Fear of permanence.” “Fear of the public running amok.”

Continue reading "Get Over Your Fear"

Lately, I’ve been exerting mental energy over what it takes to ensure a marketing campaign, no matter the medium, is sustainable. The word “sustainability” has come to mean something different to everyone it seems...it has been hijacked by the evil buzzworders.

We need a sustainable definition of sustainable.

This morning while reading Brains On Fire’s latest post my brain literally lit on fire when both sustainability and hockey were addressed.

A few days ago, Geno from Brains On Fire summed up sustainability as being real

“when the community...can continue without having to stimulate conversation and the overall movement with continued funding to stimulate conversation.”

You should go read that post.

The idea here is something we’ve been blogging about as of late. It’s the idea of relational marketing. Conversations are taking place, it’s just a question of where and how to participate. A truly sustainable marketing initiative occurs when the creators are no longer required to catalyze conversation--be it through funding or other means. A campaign is sustainable when conversations spark other conversations, which spark additional conversations, and before you know it the “campaign” has become a living, breathing brand.

So why hockey?

Continue reading "Hockey is Sustainable"

If you have looked in your Google Analytics report for March 26 and see visits tracking properly and yet 0 visitors, you are not alone. 

This is a bug in Google Analytics, and while we are waiting on a response from Google, we expect this issue to be fixed promptly.  All other data tracking seems to be unaffected, so hold tight and we will update you when we hear something.

Update-

In an effort to improve processing time, we’re now able to refresh most data much quicker (within 1-3 hours vs. 4-24 hours), however unique visitor counts are currently updated later in the day in order to account for return visitors.  As a result, throughout the day, you might see 0 reported for unique visitors.  This is not a data error! just a delay in reporting for unique visitor counts.  This should improve within the next few weeks with the goal that unique visitor counts will be updated more regularly throughout the day.

First there was Dell, then Starbucks and now there is Chrysler.

Chrysler is preparing to launch a private, online discussion forum to gather customer’s opinions on everything from product design to marketing. The forum is set to launch next month, and Advertising Age reports that with the new site,

Chrysler expects to have an advisory panel of some 2,000 people willing to participate online once or twice weekly, VP-Chief Marketing Officer Deborah Wahl Meyer told Advertising Age. “It’s a different way to be close to our customers and our future customers” without doing physical focus groups, she said. “We call it on-demand customer collaboration.”

Chrysler clearly understands they need to bridge the disconnect between their company and what their customers want. I applaud Chrysler for taking this step; but keeping the discussion limited and private seems to be a missed opportunity. Unless this is the first building block of constructing a larger social media initiative, they may end up selling their own efforts short.

Nevertheless, score one more for the big brands coming around to realize that the web is a powerful listening tool.