Business

“Tomorrow Belongs to the Unafraid.”

Will We Be Mourning Your Brand or Industry Next?
Before you go reaching for the box of tissue, this presentation isn’t meant to be a downer. It’s to inspire new innovative ways for looking at your business. It’s quite simple really, those brands that can rethink and re-imagine their core strategies will live longer, healthier, and more prosperous lives. But those that fail to embrace change and take intelligent risks, will likely become another sad statistic.

Is your business model as sound as it is fearless? Is your brand strategy as compelling as it is differentiating? It’s time to pay tribute to some recent unexpected traumas, epic disasters, and shocking casualties of the new economy.

Social Media ROI is in demand and Connie Bensen predicts the following trends for 2010 as it relates to this ambiguous thing called social media ROI.

There is a proliferation of things to monitor, measure and manage, making it very difficult and time consuming for marketers to pull together the overall picture for integrated campaigns. There will therefore be a move towards single integrated software platforms so that campaign planning and management are integrated with web and email.

1. Companies will expect ROI from their Social Media efforts.
2. The Social Media Specialist (Community Manager) position will become mainstream.
3. Cultural shift inside of companies.
4. Social Media Monitoring will be a necessary component
5. Agencies and companies will hire data analysts
6. Integration of platforms and processes will be critical.

• “Since my last report, this employee has reached rock bottom and has started to dig.”
• “His men would follow him anywhere but only out of morbid curiosity.”
• “This associate is really not so much a has-been, but more of a definitely won’t be.”
• “Works well when under constant supervision and cornered like a rat in a trap.”
• “When she opens her mouth, it seems that this is only to change feet.”
• “He would be out of his depth in a parking lot puddle.”
• “This young lady has delusions of adequacy.”
• “He sets low personal standards and then consistently fails to achieve them.”
• “This employee should go far — and the sooner he starts, the better we’ll be.”
• “This employee is depriving a village somewhere of an idiot.”
• “This employee should not be allowed to breed.”
• “This man has the whole six pack but is missing the plastic thingy that holds them all together.”
• “He certainly takes a long time to make his pointless.”
• “He doesn’t have ulcers, but he is a carrier.”
• “He’s been working with glue too much.”
• “He would argue with a signpost.”
• “He has a knack for making strangers immediately.”
• “When his IQ reaches 50, he should sell.”
• “Is apparently very careful with equipment, as his tools show very little signs of wear.”

If you were born in the 1980s, how many Jennifers and Jasons did you go to school with? A lot, right? And then gradually, those names fell out of favor and were replaced by Ashley, Aidan, Madison, Ethan. Jennifer and Jason don’t even make the top 50 anymore. Other names have been more consistently popular, however. Think Michael, Daniel, Elizabeth.

What’s this got to do with marketing? Well, a new study looked at the speed at which baby names rose to popularity and also how quickly they declined. It turns out names that skyrocket to popularity are also fastest to fall into obscurity. The same behavioral drivers surrounding baby naming can translate into product and brand adoption. According to the study’s authors:

Fads tend to be viewed negatively, the authors point out. “And if people think that sharply increasing [popularity] will be short lived, they may avoid such items to avoid doing something that may later be seen as a flash in the pan.”

The paper points to examples in the music industry of new artists who bolt to the top of sales charts, but realize lower overall sales than those whose popularity grows more slowly. “This seemingly counterintuitive finding has important implications. One is that faster adoption is not only linked to faster abandonment, but may also hurt overall success,” the authors write.

Despite the excitement it generates for a few days, the video your brand launched that “went viral” on YouTube may be entirely forgotten in a few months or weeks and ultimately do nothing for long-term growth. But if you take a slower, measured approach to building a strong community of fans, your brand may remain popular for a lot longer. There’s no viral marketing campaign around Moleskine notebooks, for example, but the brand has built a dedicated group of fans that it continues to nurture and support.

Don’t mistake faddish-popularity as an indicator of long-term brand success. Fads rise to popularity quickly without any real reason – they’re not usually fulfilling a customer need (did anyone need snap-bracelets in elementary school in 1990?).

Instead of focusing on how to get as much buzz for your product or organization as fast as possible, think of how to meticulously build a community. It takes longer and can be more work, but the reward is much greater.

No one wants to be a flash in the pan. Not even Jennifer and Jason.

Via: Social Media Today via: Wharton

Ad Fed Minnesota

BMA MN — Business Marketing Association Minnesota

i612 Online Media (web site link is to LinkedIn group)

IABC MN — International Association of Business Communicators

MDMA — Midwest Direct Marketing Association

MIMA — Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association

MN AMA — Minnesota Amaerican Marketing Association

MN PRSA — Public Relations Society of America Minnesota Chapter

MWMC — Minnesota Women in Marketing and Communications

SMBMSP — Social Media Breakfast Minneapolis St Paul

#msptweetup (Twitter group)

Via: MNHeadhunter

Social media is about connecting people and providing the tools necessary to have a conversation. That global conversation is an extremely powerful platform for spreading information and awareness about social causes and issues. That’s one of the reasons charities can benefit so greatly from being active on social media channels. But you can also do a lot to help your favorite charity or causes you are passionate about through social media.

1. Write a Blog Post

Blogging is one of the easiest ways you can help a charity or cause you feel passionate about. Almost everyone has an outlet for blogging these days — whether that means a site running WordPress, an account at LiveJournal, or a blog on MySpace or Facebook. By writing about issues you’re passionate about, you’re helping to spread awareness among your social circle. Because your friends or readers already trust you, what you say is influential.

Recently, a group of green bloggers banded together to raise individual $1 donations from their readers. The beneficiaries included Sustainable Harvest, Kiva, Healthy Child, Healthy World, Environmental Working Group, and Water for People. The blog-driven campaign included voting to determine how the funds would be distributed between the charities. You can read about the results here.

You should also consider taking part in Blog Action Day, a once a year event in which thousands of blogs pledge to write at least one post about a specific social cause (last year it was fighting poverty). Blog Action Day will be on October 15 this year.

2. Share Stories with Friends

Another way to spread awareness among your social graph is to share links to blog posts and news articles via sites like Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, and even through email. Your network of friends is likely interested in what you have to say, so you have influence wherever you’ve gathered a social network.

You’ll be doing charities you support a great service when you share links to their campaigns, or to articles about causes you care about.

3. Follow Charities on Social Networks

In addition to sharing links to articles about issues you come across, you should also follow charities you support on the social networks where they are active. By increasing the size of their social graph, you’re increasing the size of their reach. When your charities tweet or post information about a campaign or a cause, statistics or a link to a good article, consider retweeting that post on Twitter, liking it on Facebook, or blogging about it.

Following charities on social media sites is a great way to keep in the loop and get updates, and it’s a great way to help the charity increase its reach by spreading information to your friends and followers.

You can follow the Summer of Social Good Charities:
Oxfam America (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, YouTube)
The Humane Society (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Flickr)
LIVESTRONG (Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr)
WWF (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr)

4. Support Causes on Awareness Hubs

Another way you can show your support for the charities you care about is to rally around them on awareness hubs like Change.org, Care2, or the Facebook Causes application. These are social networks or applications specifically built with non-profits in mind. They offer special tools and opportunities for charities to spread awareness of issues, take action, and raise money.

It’s important to follow and support organizations on these sites because they’re another point of access for you to gather information about a charity or cause, and because by supporting your charity you’ll be increasing their overall reach. The more people they have following them and receiving their updates, the greater the chance that information they put out will spread virally.

5. Find Volunteer Opportunities

Using social media online can help connect you with volunteer opportunities offline, and according to web analytics firm Compete, traffic to volunteering sites is actually up sharply in 2009. Two of the biggest sites for locating volunteer opportunities are VolunteerMatch, which has almost 60,000 opportunities listed, and Idealist.org, which also lists paying jobs in the non-profit sector, in addition to maintaining databases of both volunteer jobs and willing volunteers.

For those who are interested in helping out when volunteers are urgently needed in crisis situations, check out HelpInDisaster.org, a site which helps register and educate those who want to help during disasters so that local resources are not tied up directing the calls of eager volunteers. Teenagers, meanwhile, should check out DoSomething.org, a site targeted at young adults seeking volunteer opportunities in their communities.

6. Embed a Widget on Your Site

Many charities offer embeddable widgets or badges that you can use on your social networking profiles or blogs to show your support. These badges generally serve one of two purposes (or both). They raise awareness of an issue and offer up a link or links to additional information. And very often they are used to raise money.

Mashable’s Summer of Social Good campaign, for example, has a widget that does both. The embeddable widget, which was custom built using Sprout (the creators of ChipIn), can both collect funds and offer information about the four charities the campaign supports.

7. Organize a Tweetup

You can use online social media tools to organize offline events, which are a great way to gather together like-minded people to raise awareness, raise money, or just discuss an issue that’s important to you. Getting people together offline to learn about an important issue can really kick start the conversation and make supporting the cause seem more real.

Be sure to check out Mashable’s guide to organizing a tweetup to make sure yours goes off without a hitch, or check to see if there are any tweetups in your area to attend that are already organized.

8. Express Yourself Using Video

As mentioned, blog posts are great, but a picture really says a thousand words. The web has become a lot more visual in recent years and there are now a large number of social tools to help you express yourself using video. When you record a video plea or call to action about your issue or charity, you can make your message sound more authentic and real. You can use sites like 12seconds.tv, Vimeo, and YouTube to easily record and spread your video message.

Last week, the Summer of Social Good campaign encouraged people to use video to show support for charity. The #12forGood campaign challenged people to submit a 12 second video of themselves doing something for the Summer of Social Good. That could be anything, from singing a song to reciting a poem to just dancing around like a maniac — the idea was to use the power of video to spread awareness about the campaign and the charities it supports.

If you’re more into watching videos than recording them, Givzy.com enables you to raise funds for charities like Unicef and St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital by sharing viral videos by e-mail.

9. Sign or Start a Petition

There aren’t many more powerful ways to support a cause than to sign your name to a petition. Petitions spread awareness and, when successfully carried out, can demonstrate massive support for an issue. By making petitions viral, the social web has arguably made them even more powerful tools for social change. There are a large number of petition creation and hosting web sites out there. One of the biggest is The Petition Site, which is operated by the social awareness network Care2, or PetitionOnline.com, which has collected more than 79 million signatures over the years.

Petitions are extremely powerful, because they can strike a chord, spread virally, and serve as a visual demonstration of the support that an issue has gathered. Social media fans will want to check out a fairly new option for creating and spreading petitions: Twitition, an application that allows people to create, spread, and sign petitions via Twitter.

10. Organize an Online Event

Social media is a great way to organize offline, but you can also use online tools to organize effective online events. That can mean free form fund raising drives, like the Twitter-and-blog-powered campaign to raise money for a crisis center in Illinois last month that took in over $130,000 in just two weeks. Or it could mean an organized “tweet-a-thon” like the ones run by the 12for12k group, which aims to raise $12,000 each month for a different charity.

In March, 12for12k ran a 12-hour tweet-a-thon, in which any donation of at least $12 over a 12 hour period gained the person donating an entry into a drawing for prizes like an iPod Touch or a Nintendo Wii Fit. Last month, 12for12k took a different approach to an online event by holding a more ambitious 24-hour live video-a-thon, which included video interviews, music and sketch comedy performances, call-ins, and drawings for a large number of prizes given out to anyone who donated $12 or more.

Bonus: Think Outside the Box

Social media provides almost limitless opportunity for being creative. You can think outside the box to come up with all sorts of innovative ways to raise money or awareness for a charity or cause. When Drew Olanoff was diagnosed with cancer, for example, he created Blame Drew’s Cancer, a campaign that encourages people to blow off steam by blaming his cancer for bad things in their lives using the Twitter hashtag #BlameDrewsCancer. Over 16,000 things have been blamed on Drew’s cancer, and he intends to find sponsors to turn those tweets into donations to LIVESTRONG once he beats the disease.

Or check out Nathan Winters, who is biking across the United States and documenting the entire trip using social media tools, in order to raise money and awareness for The Nature Conservancy.

Via: 10 Ways to Support Charity Through Social Media

When it comes to social media, about 33 percent of consumers are not connecting with brands on social networks, according to a new report by interactive marketing firm Razorfish.

For the report, Razorfish surveyed 1,000 consumers who reported both social media and ecommerce activity with the goal to find out how social media influences purchasing decisions. Overall, 80 percent were members of at least one social network and 40 percent were active in two.

“Social media has quickly become one of the most talked-about topics in marketing. We didn’t want this report to just be more of the same, so instead we took a different, more scientific approach to evaluating this phenomena and measuring its effects,” said Shiv Singh, VP and Global Social Media Lead at Razorfish.

“Today, a brand’s actions speak louder than its words and pushing out messages is no longer enough to excite and engage consumers.”

The report indicates brands must identify who influences perception including offline peers, blogs and reviews. Consumers are more likely to engage with brands with credible voices. Brands using social media need to be personal and authentic and stay away from sounding like an advertisement.

Brands who provide value to consumers gain customer loyalty. Of those surveyed, 57 percent said they visited brand fan pages at least every few weeks or months, indicating consumers are not forgetting about them. If a brand provides current, relevant content, consumers will be more likely to engage with it.

Via: WebProNews

Worldwide online advertising will grow 10 percent this year, accounting for 15.1 percent of global ad spending by 2011, according to a new report from ZenithOptimedia Group.

The report said online advertising has performed better than what was forecast three months ago due to its transparency, accountability and flexibility. Online advertising is the only category forecast for growth in 2009.

ZenithOptimedia predicts online ad spending will reach $56.8 billion this year, accounting for 12.6 percent of the global advertising market.

“By 2011 we expect it to account for 15.1% of all ad expenditures, up from 10.5% in 2008,” the report predicts.

“Most of this growth will come from paid search, which is an ideal method of reaching consumers looking for bargains. In the U.S., we predict search advertising to grow 20.0% in 2009, while traditional display grows 3.0% and classified grows just 1.8%.”

The report said some of the growth in the U.S. search advertising marketplace was due to the launch of Microsoft’s new Bing search engine, which has led to “welcome competition to Google and should spur further innovation in search.”

Overall ad spending is forecast to decrease 8.5 percent this year, down from an April forecast of a 6.9 percent decline.

The report said newspaper ad spending would continue to decline from its 2007 peak of  $131 billion globally.

“We predict newspaper ad expenditure to shrink 14.7% in 2009 and to continue shrinking for the rest of our forecast period. In 2011 we forecast newspaper ad expenditure will total US$101 billion, 22.7% below its 2007 peak,” the agency said.

Meanwhile, overall ad budgets should decline

People who specialize in interactive marketing hardly have to worry about whether the recession has damaged their industry, according to new data from Forrester Research.  Indeed, it

looks like the field of interactive marketing is set to thrive, even as offline aspects may be de-emphasized.

Forrester predicts that about $25.6 billion will be spent on interactive (display, email, mobile, search, social media) this year.  It’s supposed to represent 12 percent of all ad spend, which is respectable enough.

But by the time 2014 rolls around, Forrester predicts that roughly $55.0 billion will go towards interactive marketing efforts.  And that may represent as much as 21 percent of all ad spend for the

year as overall advertising budgets decline.

Shar VanBoskirk reasons in a post on the Forrester Blog, “With dollars moving out of traditional media toward less expensive and more efficient interactive tools, marketers will actually need less money to accomplish their current advertising goals.”

Or, to look at the shift in a slightly less measured way, the executive summary of VanBoskirk’s report also refers to the “cannibalization of traditional media.”

Regardless, though, it looks like some interesting changes will be afoot in the advertising industry.

Via: WebProNews