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"

Recently, a client posed this question:

“Some of the people with whom I work think we should collect email addresses from colleagues, friends, and associates who are affiliated with our industry. They want to add these contacts to our email newsletter mailing list. We work hard to make our newsletter content relevant to anyone in our industry, so they feel the contacts wouldn’t mind receiving the mailing. What are your thoughts on this strategy of growing our list?”

In my response I tried to go light on shaming her for even thinking that adding people to an email marketing list without their permission is appropriate. Instead, I wanted to emphasize that something of real value is at stake when they take this approach to list building. I also pointed out that there are better ways to ‘take advantage’ of colleagues who MAY enjoy their newsletter. I summarized my response to her below; let me know if you have a different take.

Continue reading "Build Email Relationships, Not Spam Lists"

It seemed natural, given that marketing and social media are all about relationships, that our Middle School Marketing discussion for October spent a fair amount of time exploring commitment – and it should be no surprise that the darling of social media marketing, the corporate blog, was the center of conversation. Ryan Moede threw out the commitment question. Paraphrasing: “How do we set expectations around the level of commitment inherent to social marketing?”

Continue reading "Making the Commitment at Middle School Marketing"

The last two weeks have led to some interesting insights into consumer’s expectations of how they want to interact with brands.

From Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere, which reported that 4 in 5 bloggers write about their experiences – good or bad – with a company or product, to Cone’s report that an overwhelming majority of Americans (85%) active on blogs and other social media services expect to interact with companies through social media.

Continue reading "Social Expectations - Consumers are Looking for Better Interaction"

So… I’ve been busy my first month at Viget. As the new marketing services director, I’ve spent a lot of time learning from colleagues, meeting new people, redefining our marketing services, and working with a wide range of clients.  Like everyone else, I wish there were more hours in the day. There’s always someone else I could call, an email I could have sent, a blog post to write, or cool tool to check out.

One of the many things I’ve learned this past month is if you’ve got something to say, blog. So in talking with the team, we decided to continue sharing what we’re learning in a more regular format. It’s about giving other online marketers a peek at what’s working (and what’s not), and our take on "why." We’re calling it “Under The Hood” because, just like any well-maintained car, there’s a certain amount of maintenance required for true marketing success. And good marketers will tell you there’s always an opportunity for some fine tuning and performance enhancements.

Continue reading "Introducing Me and “Under the Hood”"

Lane Becker of Get Satisfaction delivered one of the best talks at this year’s Web 2.0 Expo in New York. (You can check out my full recap of the conference here.) 

His talk, Customer Service is the New Marketing, has important insights for how any company - startup or major corporation - promotes their product and builds loyalty from their customers. Becker made the case that the best way to market your company is through the customer experience itself. Drawing from the hospitality industry, Becker suggested that the role of a hotel concierge is the new model for meeting customer’s needs. As Brian Solis aplty wrote:

Marketing-savvy corporate executives are working with PR, Advertising, and Marcom teams to explore options and strategies on how to participate in relevant online conversations. This represents a shift in outbound marketing as it creates a direct channel between companies and customers, and ultimately people. It starts to look a lot less like marketing and a lot more like customer service.

Continue reading "Web 2.0 Expo: Customer Service is the New Marketing"

Our September Middle School Marketing group continued the tradition of discussing ways to bridge the gap between old and new school marketing. There were several new faces, but as always the conversation sparked some interesting debate. We initially set out to discuss three questions:

1. What are some examples of social media client case studies? How have mature companies used social media not just to experiment but to really have an impact (beyond just early-adopter “luck”)? How did they do it? (I guess that’s three righ there...oops)


2. What tools and metrics are companies using to measure and demonstrate success?


3. Is email marketing dying, morphing, or re-surging? How does it fit overall?

As usual, time was against us, and we only got to points one and two (mostly two)--leaving us plenty to talk about in October!

Here’s a quick recap:

The question "How do you measure social media?" is getting louder. It seems like everyone is asking, "How do you quantify?" "How do you measure?" or "What defines success?"

Nicholas kicked it off with a live demo of Radian6 capabilities.  Our review of this monitoring tool raised an interesting discussion about "measuring" vs. "monitoring." You "measure" goals, you "monitor" conversations. "Measuring" defines a goal and measures success in fulfilling that goal, while "monitoring" simply reports on what’s happening and does not fulfill a goal in and of itself (KD Paine has a good post on this and also check out Ryan’s post on how Mini Cooper linked buzz to sales). That being said, the two need to work in tandem. With all these monitoring tools it might be easier to keep track of your brand, but many companies struggle with analyzing data, measuring it against a goal, and, more importantly, acting.

Everyone agreed Radian6 seemed like a pretty solid tool, but there was also some talk of other options, including one of my favorite’s Yahoo! Pipes (which is free). Rather than go in-depth on each of these tools, check a few for yourself:

Continue reading "Middle School Marketing - Social Monitoring"

Steph and I just had an IM discussion about corporate blogs, and we thought we’d share it with you. Why? Because it is a frequent topic of conversation in the Viget Marketing Lab.

When a company decides to "get relevant" in the online space, a blog is usually the first thing they think of—which is understandable as the ubiquity of blogs engenders visions of attainability and low risk. The company may already have "News and Events" content, so it sort of makes sense to just transition that content into a blog, right?

Not exactly.

Here is the IM conversation, and I close with a summary in case you want to skip straight to the bottom. Check it out (as a disclaimer I had to remove a few pieces that were client specific, and alter a few lines so it makes sense. And please excuse the grammar, and occasional inside joke):

Steph H: question

Josh C: talk to me

Continue reading "Corporate Blogging Tip"

The digital era has redefined what it means to create and sustain a brand, writes Bob Greenberg, CEO and chief creative officer of R/GA in AdWeek. The challenge is to create engaging experiences across multiple digital touchpoints that cultivate the company’s branding goals and respond to the user’s needs. 

For example, Greenberg notes the role that Nike’s  Ballers Network Facebook app has played in facilitating engagement between the Nike brand and its consumers. The team at Nike looked for opportunities to better serve basketball players, and found the role of facilitator to help connect players and find open courts. Similar to their work to connect runners, it’s a great move by Nike to identify opportunities to build engagement through facilitating connections with their core basketball audience.  

Continue reading "Cultivating Brands in a Digital World"

Ryan and I recently returned from ad:tech Chicago, and I thought I’d add my two cents to Ryan’s summation. As a warning, this post has two parts which, although related, could be completely separate posts. Accordingly, I’ll save you the pain of attempting to create a lame analogy in an effort to connect the two topics and just split it up.

Part 1) Clay Shirky Was Awesome.

Part 2) Case Studies.

Continue reading "“If It’s Being Discussed, It’s Marketing” & Case Studies from ad:tech"

With the Olympics in full swing, Nike has gone all out to promote their vast new lineup of products and the innovative technology behind them.

But rather than rely solely on classic Nike advertising with hardcore athletes doing their thing to a rocking soundtrack, they’ve rounded out their advertising strategy with an impressive, in-depth collection of conversations with the people behind the Nike magic - product designers, engineers and scientists in the Nike Lab.

Continue reading "Nike’s Branded Storytelling"

Nearly 60 percent of the respondents to a recent McKinsey global survey reported satisfaction with Web 2.0 initiatives and see them as a driver of competitive advantage. The McKinsey Global Survey Results on Building the Web 2.0 Enterprise (free with registration) also reported that these same companies expect to increase their efforts inleveraging these tools.

The report also highlights that this is bigger than just PR or marketing - companies are adapting their organizational structure and process to better take advantage of social tools.

This isn’t always an easy task for traditional companies; but some are recognizing that increasing their use of collaborative tools both internally and externally is a valuable endeavor.  Peter Kim puts it well: "Social technologies are bigger than just marketing and PR campaigns.  They’re helping to reinvent the organization.  Companies satisfied with their experience with Web 2.0 technologies are applying them within change management practices and organizational structures. Companies are using new tools to reconnect with customers for co-creation and collaboration. ‘Reconnecting,’ you ask?  Yes, the way businesses started and survived long before advertising as we hate it existed."

Digital marketing is at an unprecedented stage today. Never before has such a rich and immersive set of tools spanned across media to allow companies and consumers to interact. And where marketing was once segregated to individual media - print, television, radio - digital marketing has smashed these silos to allow a new kind of persuasive digital storytelling to emerge. 

This transition is not without it’s struggles, and for two days in Chicago last week, digital marketers from across the country gathered for the latest AdTech conference to discuss what’s working and what still needs to improve.

Continue reading "Blending Creativity and Technology in Digital Marketing at AdTech"