Last week, Viget hosted the December Social Media Club DC event at our Falls Church headquarters. Our good friend Justin Thorpe with Clearspring Technologies gave a presentation on How Sharing Can Help You Reach More Users Online. For those who couldn't make the event, I've provided a quick recap below:

People are spending more time in social networks and online communities. While this may seem obvious, Justin drew upon a relevant dinner party analogy to drive the point home. When spending time with friends, family and co-workers in social situations, we converse on an array of topics ranging from what we've been up to and what's interesting to us to current events and television shows. People love to share. Social media tools have made it easier to share online - and folks love it! Widgets make it easier for individuals and companies to "share"  - to take content from one place online and put it somewhere else (usually on facebook, iGoogle, or blogs). The succesful widgets tend to focus on simplcity. Justin gave a couple of great examples, many of which can be found on his Favorite Widgets blog.

Continue reading "Social Media Club DC Recap"

As digital marketers strive to deliver value and meaning for consumers, the widget is increasingly becoming an essential part of the overall marketing mix. Brands, content publishers and just about everyone in between are discovering entertaining or useful opportunities to launch branded applications for their customers. Nike, InStyle and UPS among others have all created widgets to connect with customers in a way that is direct, sharable and interactive. (We even relied heavily on a widget strategy for promoting singer songwriter Martin Sexton.)

Bob Garfield writes in AdAge that the widget fits nicely in the post-advertising age, and quotes Contagious Magazine's Jessica Greenwood who says that, "the widget's value is 'like a basic unit of utility. The marketing becomes part of the product."

But how does a brand figure out where to start with widgets? For that, I turned to Justin Thorp, Community Manager at Clearsping Technologies, whose widget platform earned 332 million unique visitors worldwide in October. Here is Justin's take on where to begin:

When should a company consider launching a widget strategy?
I think the question is, “When should a company consider widgets as part of their overall communications strategy?”  If you’re publishing any type of content online, you need to develop a strategy for how you’re going to get your content in the hands of existing and potential users.  Because they’re portable and can move all over the Web, widgets are a great mechanism for doing this.  We recommend widgets for content publishers who want to extend their reach beyond their domain and who hope to reach the hard-to-reach user on the Social Web.

Continue reading "Getting Started with Widgets"

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"

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"