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?”

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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.

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If it’s an 8am meeting with eager conversations about Twitter and measuring ROI, it must mean the Middle School Marketing crew was back in action yesterday morning at the Lab.

We gathered again this month to continue our conversation about bridging traditional best practices in online marketing with the latest trends in social media marketing.  As so many marketing conversations do lately, ours quickly focused in on Twitter (proud new owners of the local startup Summize). When it comes to the bottom line, one person asked if it is worth investing the time and energy into Twitter. (And for that matter, what about the rest of the social media utility world?) While the group had various perspectives on how they used Twitter, without a doubt it’s biggest value was in providing a radically improved tool to help companies do a better job of listening. Nicholas was even kind enough to put together a spreadhseet of helpful services.

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One week after the new iPhone’s debut, some of the most intriguing buzz centers around the development of native mobile applications. For marketers and brand managers alike, this poses one the best opportunities in a long time to create meaningful brand engagement.

Up until now, the excitement over mobile marketing had been trying to deliver relevant ads to various handsets. But the iPhone offers up a more relevant and useful platform for brands to develop applications that provide a real value for their users (And for those of you who track this blog, you know we love marketing ideas that provide a service for customers).

Continue reading "iPhone Helps Turn Marketers into Problem-Solvers"

As if by divine circumstance after Steph’s post about her experience window shopping on the MINI web site, a recent article highlighted MINI’s work to measure the connection between online buzz and actual sales of the diminutive but spunky car.

The marketing team at MINI worked with MotiveQuest to research and measure what people were saying online about the car and MINI brand, and through their analysis, created the the Online Promoter Score in order to “correlate the relationship between marketing and online brand advocacy to sales by measuring the net frequency of people recommending a brand online.” Truly a tall order.

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