It's the consumers' media world - we're just marketing in it.

AdWeek's 30th anniversary edition appropriately captured the theme of this month's Middle School Marketing event here at Viget. More than ever, consumers media consumption habits are radically changing, and marketers are struggling to keep up. Matt Smith of SmithGifford kicked things off this morning with a similar message - media fragmentation is the marketer's biggest problem, and it takes more than a savvy media planner to overcome the dilution of consumer's attention. 

Continue reading "Middle School Marketing: One Big Idea, Many Fragmented Markets"

Last week, Josh and I had the pleasure of spending 3 days at Google HQ with other GAACs learning about new and upcoming features and tools, as well as how our peers are utilizing all that Google as to offer. Some of what was covered is now included on the GA site and our blog, and other stuff is, well, coming soon. Sorry... can’t blog about the super secret stuff.

It was easy to see why Google was ranked the best place to work. Free food (everywhere), the gym, dogs at work, and onsite oil changes are all great perks. Josh and I especially liked the communal bikes! This is post, however, is really about what struck me most about our time at Google:

Continue reading "Hooked on Google Analytics"

Today, I gave a presentation regarding Social Media Marketing at the Women In Technology event, "Intersection of Marketing and Media." Other panelists included Matt Goddard (R2integrated), Susan Kearney (Smith|Gifford), and Brian Reed (BoxTone). My content wasn't earth-shattering (I only had 7 minutes!), but I got a lot of requests to post the slides - mostly because I included a case study about the Motrin Moms drama that broke over the weekend. I've inlcuded the slides below.

Shout outs to other bloggers whose content I read and re-purposed for my presentation. This includes, but is not limited to: Jessica Gottlieb (the mom who started it all on Twitter), Jeremiah Owyang, Laura Fitton, and LadyBug Landing (the women behind the backlash video). Lastly, props to the folks who got involved in the conversation (I guess that's me, now), and reminded a lot of people and one company of how quickly a groundswell can spread through social media. Not only did Motrin miss the mark with an out of touch ad, but they missed an opportunity to quickly respond to the rising crisis through their Twitter account (no mention at all of the issue!) or other available social media tools.

 

Barack Obama earned a new title this past week, but you may not have noticed that in addition to now owning #44, Obama also was named Marketer of the Year. Awarded at the Association of National Advertisers' annual conference, Obama beat out a few brands you might be familiar with – Nike, Apple and even the much-loved Zappos.com.

And rightly so – the effectiveness of his campaign has set a new benchmark for all advertisers and marketers, especially those in the digital space. His online campaign for change was a grassroots movement on steroids. The seven million names on its lists (email addresses, mobile phone numbers, Facebook and MySpace pages) represent a staggering 11 percent of the approximately 64 million votes the President-elect received. The Obama campaign was an impressive orchestration of on-message brand discipline, social media marketing, networking, user-generated content and direct marketing that built a fiercely passionate movement.

Continue reading "Digital Marketing Lessons from the Obama Campaign"

Like all great musicians, Martin Sexton has a passionately devoted group of fans around the country. Blending soulful lyrics with a bluesy acoustic guitar, Sexton relishes the freedom to craft a unique sound that continually captures the spirit of the people he meets along the way during his epic tours across the country.

But being an independent musician means going it alone in today's already fractured music scene without any major label support to reach new fans. So to to help promote his new album, Solo, we worked with Martin to create a social media marketing strategy that helped Martin tell his story of life on the road and reach a new audience.

Continue reading "Under The Hood - Martin Sexton Gets Social"

Google Analytics just rolled out some pretty amazing features that anyone who is into web analytics can get excited about.

The new features:

• Custom Reports
• Advanced Segmentation (Soooo good)
• Motion Charts (sort of blew my mind)
• New Dashboard and User Interface
• An API! (this, this is just amazing. Dios mio)
• Integration with AdSense

Let's just go down the line and give a brief recap on a few of these tools (with a few videos for those of you who are already spacing out), and why they matter to you -- even if you're not a data nerd.

Continue reading "Google Analytics Just Got WAY Better - API, Segments & Reports"