By Kathleen Ramirez, Fahlgren EVP and Corporate Media Director

I’d like to take this opportunity to introduce you to the writing styles of our Associate Media Director, Chrystie Reep.  Chrystie is the backbone of many of our digital media programs in place today.  Those of us who get to work with her everyday know how knowledgable, passionate and dedicated she is to the continued evolution of how to really connect with consumers.  Enjoy….and look for future posts from her in the future.  Great job, Chrystie!!!

A good friend of mine recently bought an iPhone.

Since then I’ve heard him say how much it has “changed his life.” My first thought was….seriously?

I laughed off the comment and attributed it to being stuck with a wireless plan sans uber-cool devices. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was not an exaggeration.

Mobile devices (you know they aren’t just phones anymore) have become the center of most consumers communication universe. PDAs, digital cameras and MP3 players are on their way to becoming obsolete as stand-alone devices. For that…we salute you iPhone!

As marketers, our passion is to ensure that our clients’ messages are reaching the right consumer at the right place and time. Mobile is on the verge of being a true player in terms of achieving a balance of reach and accountability. The speed in which mobile has evolved is nothing short of remarkable. Equally remarkable is the ability people have adopted this technology as part of their own personal media mix.

Check out this presentation demonstrating the impact of mobile as a viable marketing channel.

Curious minds want to know-how has your device changed your life?

By Alaina Sheer,

The Party Favors

If you missed Part 1 of my series “What are you bringing to the party” - catch up here.

If you’re stepping into a social marketing party, don’t walk through that door empty-handed.

First identify a pyramid of messages you’d like to impress upon the consumer and choose the space you’ll
be delivering them in (i.e. a social network, Twitter, a blog or all of the above). The nature of your party favor could determine that first step. It’s best to have an idea of what you want to give away before you choose your platforms.

For example, if you are offering valuable and informative content you may want to focus most of your energy on a blog and an accompanying Twitter account. If you have a coupon offer you could use Twitter or Facebook. It’s easy when planning a social marketing campaign to get carried away with one idea, one aspect of the campaign and to lose sight of the long-term goal, which should be to convert online impressions into customers. You don’t just want to make a few acquaintances at your party, you want to make some long-term friends so you’re invited back again and again.

With all of that in mind here are my recommendations for social media party favors.

1. Content.

Think, for a moment, about the flow of conversation at a party. One guest, we’ll call him Matt, tells a story in the kitchen. Moments later someone who heard that story walks into the living room and says, “Hey, did you hear Matt’s story? It’s crazy! You’ve got to go hear it.”

Rather than having Matt walk into the room and retell the story the party goer will often relay his version and so on and so forth. With social media one party goer can instantly pass Matt’s story on to hundreds of his friends in just one click.

So what content will you be contributing to the party? What stories do you have to tell? And how will you deliver them? Let’s say you have a book store. In that case your brand could find a passionate employee to blog or Tweet excellent book recommendations to customers. The key is to become a resource of information. The information you share can make your customers laugh, cry, think or even feel compelled to action.

2. Coupons.

If you’ve charged your social marketing brand ambassador to walk into a party and convince everyone inside to try your product, a coupon is an excellent conversion tool. Remember, you are a brand after all and that logo on your forehead carries with it preconceived notions of who you are and the idea that everything you say is a sales pitch. Offering your new friends a coupon is one way to earn their trust. Essentially, in the social media space, you’re saying - “I really, truly believe in our product. So much so, that we’d like you to try it. And if you could pass this on to a few of your friends, we’d appreciate it.”

Every coupon I’ve used in the past year has had some kind of virtual component. My friends are always sending me coupons via e-mail or on Twitter. And because a smart brand made their coupon viral I, in turn, share it with all of my friends. It’s quite simple really. Leave the rules of yesterday in the past - they don’t apply anymore. Share everything.

3. Warm Fuzzies.

If you can’t afford a coupon or take the time to invest in content another option is to endorse a charitable cause.

There are hundreds of thousands of small charities out there on Facebook, on Twitter or blogging and they’re all looking for assistance in spreading the word. Most would certainly entertain the idea of a coordinated campaign with your brand. If the charity already has their social networks in place this could be a great way for a brand to get their feet wet in the social media space.

Look at this campaign for an example. Sponsors donate a bowl of food for a humane society animal for each click. I found this on Facebook after one of my friends joined the group tied to the campaign. I clicked the button and felt all warm and fuzzy, like I’d done something good. I’ll go back tomorrow and click it again and tell my friends to pass it on.

[Photo credit: photo credit: C1ssou]

To be continued with…

Part III - The Art of Conversation
Part IV  - Trusting your Social Media Ambassador

By Amy Dawson, Senior Vice President/Healthcare Account Director

I was meeting with Gary Ansel, MD, an interventional cardiologist at Riverside Methodist Hospital, the other morning and we ended up talking about patient experiences with hospitals.

The conversation turned toward how the experience can make or break a patient’s perception, regardless of how good the clinical care is. And he’s right. He routinely asks “is there anything else I can do for you?” before he finishes up a patient consult, and his efforts always are met with positive feedback.

In this world of commoditized, non-distinct brands, we’ve all had interactions with companies that don’t put enough emphasis on the customer experience. Advertising, marketing and communication can all help build a brand, but driving people to a negative experience can spell the demise of a strong brand. And blogger Bruce Temkin points this out in his paper, The 6 Laws of the Customer Experience.

Temkin describes some of the implications of his six laws and there are a few that really resonated with me:

1. Employees need to be empowered. How frustrating is it to be passed from person to person when you have a problem? Empower the front-line person to fix it and you minimize the risk of that customer going away unhappy, and telling multiple people about their bad experience.
2. You know more than your customers; deal with it. No where does this seem more evident than in hospitals. They’re scary, anxiety-producing places full of procedure names, acronyms and process steps that are understood internally, but seem very complex for patients and families. Our client, Riverside Methodist, does a wonderful job helping patients know where to go by personally escorting lost visitors, and explaining that PAD, or peripheral artery disease, is blocked arteries in the arms and legs.
3. Don’t let company organization drive experiences. As a customer, it’s not my problem that your back-end operations aren’t integrated. I was frustrated over the holidays when I looked up a book on the Barnes and Noble Web site, found it was available at the store close to work, went to buy it and the price was considerably higher in the store than online. Rather than match the price, they lost the sale.
4. Don’t under-spend on training. This is something that seems to be lost when new hires are made. Rather than throw a new employee into work, companies should invest in their staff and give them everything they’ll need to feel confident and provide the level of service you expect from them.

Check out Bruce’s 6 Laws. I’m sure they’ll inspire you to see how you can improve the customer experience with your brand.

By Sam Williams, Account Manager

Are brands, like Valentine’s Day, on overload?

I was killing time the other day thumbing through the Valentines Day cards at a local grocery store. (I say “killing time” because I’m cynical … and because I have no need to purchase a card since there’s no one other than my dog and he has no use for paper cards, regardless of the “holiday”.)

As I was reviewing the plethora of cards, I took notice of the various headings separating them. For Him; For Her; For Husband; For Wife; For Dad From Kids; For Pre-teen Boy… And it struck me: How many ways do we need to say Happy Valentines Day? On the whole, it’s all so overwhelming and “noisy”. Valentines Day, as a brand, has gone overboard! But then I realized, in the context of a single card, in an envelope in my own hands away from everything else and the message is more digestible, easier to understand. I realized, there’s a marketing lesson in this love-overload experience.

In my work, I’m often challenged by ads that want to say everything in one creative execution, presumably to make it “work harder”. It appears as though the company is looking for a silver bullet that delivers their entire pitch instead of building the conversation one selling point at a time. Like the wall of Valentines Day cards, they’re trying to force their brands to be all things to all people - at the same time.

Brands and even products are umbrellas for communications.

Features and benefits, the selling points, become the subjects of individual creative executions, not support-points shoehorned into one ad. Consider the iPhone commercials, a product that seemingly is all things to all people.

In the first year, we saw variations on a single theme: One device for all your needs. Sure the spots showcased the picture functionality, the email, contacts and, of course, the phone; but the single focus was the same: one device for all your needs.

As the public became familiar with the device’s capabilities, we saw more specific spots focused and drilling down on key features and benefits such as the Internet or more recently the App Store.

Again, the new spots showcase a diversity of applications in action, but focus on the one overriding message of the ad - the App Store, a unique benefit to the iPhone, provides endless convenience to the user.

In fact, if you go online and search for iPhone commercials (be careful, there’s some spoofs out there), you’ll find there are tens and hundreds of individual executions, each singly focused on one key message point, distilled to be understood almost universally. Clarity of message - a single focus, a feature and benefit fully explained to its basic and universal conclusion - is more effective at engaging and penetrating an audience than giving all the reasons to buy a product up front.

To make an execution work harder is to narrow the message to a pin point, not widen the scope and diffuse its potency. In this case, the message is, “Happy Valentines Day.” Expressed either as a pre-teen rockin’ V-day or just a simple, “with love…”

The message doesn’t change, how we say it might, but the take-away rings clear.

[Photo: photo credit: Damian Cugley]

By Katherine Zuehlke, Account Supervisor

It’s 6:30am and my toddler is letting me know she’s ready to start the day.

We do the same thing every morning. I put her oatmeal in the microwave and like clock work, she points to the TV and says, “Dorda.” Only a mother would know baby talk, but my daughter wants to watch Dora the Explorer while she eats her breakfast.

Every morning we watch Dora the Explorer on Nick Jr. She’s only a toddler but already my daughter is a creature of habit and knows when she eats breakfast she gets to watch TV. And she already has a favorite brand - Dora the Explorer. 

The funny thing is I don’t mind one bit. I have found myself indulging in her desire to have everything Dora. Because I think it’s cute every time she sees something Dora and says “Dorda,” I end up purchasing that product for her. Our last trip to the grocery store was an event; we got Dora crackers, soup, bandages and an electric toothbrush - all things that we already had at home but she didn’t care about that.

Her choice of consumer products is based on whose face is on the packaging. She asked for crackers the other day and wouldn’t eat the normal box of animal crackers because she wanted the Dora animal crackers instead. The animal crackers tasted exactly the same but the package was different and my toddler knew it.

She also knew the difference between her regular pink toothbrush and her new Dora toothbrush - both Colgate products but one was the definite winner in my toddler’s eyes. Colgate and Nick Jr.’s Dora the Explorer, both well-known brands, partnered together to produce a toddler’s dream toothbrush.

Colgate transformed their child’s electric toothbrush and gave it new appeal reaching a very important audience - moms of toddlers.

Brand Extensions

Brand extensions have helped companies build their brands and become top-of-mind in consumer purchasing behavior for decades. In 1979, Edward M. Tauber coined the term “brand extensions” to describe leveraging a well-known brand name in one category to launch a new product in a different category.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Alaina Sheer,

It seems every brand wants in on the social marketing party. 

This we can agree on. But how do you get in?

The big challenge and often the stalling point for many brands, and coincidentally people, is a colossal fear
of rejection. And if you’re a brand - the “imposter” - that dreaded rejection in the social media space is entirely possible and, I’ll be honest, more likely. However, just like in life, there are ways to avoid it all together and smart brands are winning in the space while others flounder, a bit clueless as to what they’re doing wrong. 

I have long equated the social marketing space, whether it be Facebook, Twitter or a blog, to a party that’s already raging - a very cool party, yes, and some are cooler than others. Regardless, you - the brand - were not technically invited to any of them. 

You may wear the trendiest outfit, planning it out ever so carefully beforehand. But no matter how hard you try, that logo tattooed across your forehead won’t go unnoticed and you end up in the corner alone, bored and perhaps asking yourself why you spent so much money on that outfit. 

I’m using the singular “you” here but in reality there are hundreds of people behind any brand. And this is where most brands hit a road block. In the social media space you have to choose one person, one human, to wear that outfit and actually walk into the party and represent the entire brand.

This person may not necessarily be from your marketing department, or from your ad agency, this person should be chosen based on their healthy understanding of the brand, commitment, passion and personal desire to communicate with others - you know the person I’m talking about - the person everyone wants to hang out with - the cool kid. 

If there are a few parties on the block - one for twenty-somethings and another for baby boomers - you may choose more than one party goer for your brand. But, whatever you do, don’t send them in empty-handed. Teach them the art of conversation, give them permission to actually act human and arm them with some irresistable party favors.

To be continued with…

Part II - The Party Favors
Part III - The Art of Conversation
Part IV  - Trusting your Social Media Ambassador

If you’re thinking I’m crazy for comparing social marketing to life, think again — social marketing is a part of life for millions of Americans and if it’s not yet, it will be. Stay tuned. 

[ photo credit: tristanbrand ]