Ann has an extensive background in travel and tourism, consumer products and business-to-business marketing. As an account director, Ann is responsible for leading account strategy development, program management, planning, execution and program measurement for several of the agency’s top accounts.

By Ann Oliver, Account Director

Using Mobile Technology to Reach Moms in New Ways

My daughter was growing bored sitting, once again, waiting for her brother’s baseball practice to wrap up. The usual distractions and games had grown tired, and I was running out of tricks. I checked the time on my Blackberry, noticed the icon for Pandora and had an idea. In less than 90 seconds, my daughter was happily singing along on her very own “Hannah Montana” station I created in the Pandora app. Occupied child, happy mom.

The call for app-based mobile experiences just keeps getting louder. commScore estimates that there are now more than 200,000 mobile apps available across various smartphone platforms, and the numbers keep growing.  That got me wondering, are mobile applications a good way for marketers to reach busy moms?

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By Ann Oliver, Account Director

My key takeaways

We’ve all heard the impressive statistics about women and the online world.

•  Women are the majority of internet usage now – 53%
• The fastest growing group on Facebook is women.
• Women who are on the internet trust the internet information more than other sources

I attended BlogHer ‘09 in Chicago and the focus of this conference was specifically on women and blogs. More than 1,400 bloggers, marketers, media reps, and PR practitioners were in attendance. This is the fifth year for the BlogHer Conference and the largest to date.  BlogHer was created in 2005 with a mission “To create opportunities for women who blog to pursue exposure, education, community, and economic empowerment” according to their website.

During the course of three days, I learned so much and it helped put many of the stats we all hear into context.  I attended Blogher ‘09  not as a blogger but as a marketer trying to better understand the incredibly powerful world of women bloggers. The conference is set up in two parts;  Blogher Business and BlogHer ‘09. BlogHer Business is directed to marketers,  blog writers, and other social media practitioners who are interested in reaching women online. BlogHer Business highlights best practices and case studies for connecting with women online, specifically in the social media space.  Following BlogHer Business is BlogHer, which offers blog writers many tools such as technical labs (called Geek Labs–what a great name!) education workshops, intense breakout sessions focused on hot blogging topics and lots of opportunities for networking, connecting and just plain socializing.

I attended both and was overwhelemed by the experience. From a business perspective, I learned a ton and have many great case studies and best practices to share (the top takeaways follow).  As a woman and mother, I was encouraged by the sense of community, support and camaraderie these women share. You may have seen some less than flattering articles or posts about bad behavior (especially as it relates to “swag”) by the women in attendance. But overall, the women I met were smart, ambitious, considerate and they were in attendance to learn, share and become better at their craft.

At the Business conference, five case studies were shared and each used social media to build successful marketing programs. These case studies were presented by the actual marketers who developed and ran the campaigns–having a first person perspective made the cases more real especially when the marketers spoke of the challenges they faced–internally and externally.  

Key takeaways:

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By Ann Oliver, Account Director

Finding reasons to celebrate

We recently launched a new campaign for Balloon Time Helium Balloon Kits. We started the project by laying out our communication objectives, and then talked about strategies that will help us reach these goals. Sounds pretty traditional so far, right?  But connecting with moms and reaching moms during the party decoration purchasing cycle has led us to develop some very fun social media applications to integrate with our traditional programs.

Why this investment in social media now?

Is 2009 the year to risk our limited marketing funds and test the waters of social media? Our Balloon Time client has enjoyed tremendous success with their online marketing program since its inception just four short years ago. Of course over that time we’ve evolved the program and changed some of the media partners and tactics we started with. But our objective has remained consistent - connect with influencer moms. The research we’ve seen points to social media as a key connection point.

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By Ann Oliver, Account Director

Last evening I had the pleasure of  attending the Columbus Business First Forty Under 40 Awards which recognizes “players in the business community under the age of 40 who show professional drive and community involvement.” 

The emcees shared a brief summary of each honoree’s professional accomplishments  and community service before bestowing the impressive award.  As I listened to each of these stories, I was inspired by the hard work and focus each one of these professionals bring every day to their work and the passion these people have for the communities, charities, churches, arts organizations and philanthropic boards they serve.

The class of 2009  was selected from a group of nearly 200 nominees. Among this prestigious group are two of my Fahlgren co-workers, Jenny Fuerst and Kathleen Ramirez.  Check out their profiles in the Forty Under 40 supplement from Business First which hits the newsstands today.  

Congratulations to all the Forty Under 40 honorees, and most especially to our own inspiring team members Jenny and Kathleen!

By Ann Oliver, Account Director

What’s for dinner?

I’ve been asked this question nearly every day for the last ten years or so (prior to that, dinner was complimentery appetizers at happy hour). It’s a challenge to constantly come up with tasty, easy, and economical recipe ideas. Lucky for me I discovered AllRecipes.com about eight years ago and it’s been one of my favorite go-to sites ever since.

Before the buzz words User Generated Content, Multi-media and Online Community became ubiquitous, AllRecipes.com was organizing visitors’ favorite recipes and the community was rating and reviewing them.  Home cooks upload pictures of their delicious creations, users share ideas on how to make it better or offer compliments on the tasty results.

I was really impressed when a co-worker who knows that I am a fan of the site, mentioned a new iPhone app, Dinner Spinner, available free from the site. I do not have an iPhone or iTouch, I use the mobile version of AllRecipes when I’m remote.  But after checking out Dinner Spinner, I’m thinking I may need to make a smart-phone upgrade.  I won’t be the only one. eMarketer predicts 53% of the world’s population will have a mobile phone by 2014 - many of them will likely be smart phones capable of storing applications for everything you can imagine. Like recipes. 

Dinner Spinner, for the iPhone or iPod Touch, allows you to pick out what kind of dish you want, how much time you have and the main ingredient. What’s the “spinner” part of the Dinner Spinner app? You can randomize one of the search criteria or shake your iPhone to spin for ideas–how cool is that?

All Recipes 2008 Year End Report highlights the huge rise in home cooking. It makes sense that eating at home is a trend consistent with a down economy. Maybe a next gen feature of Dinner Spinner could be a search field for cost per serving?

Kudos to Allrecipes.com for providing on-the-go tools that help get dinner on the table and for giving me plenty of food for thought.

By Ann Oliver, Account Director

I was in the Gap yesterday, scooping up the latest round of markdowns.

When I got to the register, I paused and tried to recall if I had coupon for my purchase-it seems EVERY retailer these days has mailed me a coupon. Rather than make my purchase and regret it later. I had the clerk put my items on hold until I could check.

I’m not the only one focused on saving money this holiday season. One of my co-workers started a holiday coupon swap; share the coupons you won’t be using and swap them for ones that you can redeem. The basket is full of $10, $15 and $25 savings cards.

Is anyone else “clipping” coupons?

The New York Times calls coupons, “this season’s must have for marketers.” According to the 2008 Industry Trends Report from PromoMagazine.com, for the first time in 16 years, coupon redemption did not decline. 2007 saw a six percent increase in the number of coupons offered over 2006-that translates into 16 BILLION more coupons than the previous year. CMS, a leading consumer packaged goods coupon management company, noted that the quality of the offer (discount amount) has also increased over previous years. No kidding–$10 off ANY purchase (Victoria’s Secret), $15 off of a $30 purchase (Express), $25 off of $100 (Macy’s), this adds up to some serious savings.

Women are responsible for most holiday spending decisions-and we are looking for ways to save. More than two-thirds of US online females surveyed in October 2008 by SheSpeaks said they would try to use more coupons and coupon codes this year, and nearly as many said they would spend more time online looking for bargains. And you know, we like to share the bargains with our friends (see coupon basket above). Two-thirds of poll respondents said they forwarded online coupons, and nearly 80% said they had shared a coupon with a friend during the past three months.
Taking coupons to another level

The specialty retailer Lucky Brand understands the power of the “forward” command. They’ve launched a consumer-generated coupon and online promotion for the holiday season. Check out LuckyBuckOff.com and try to “buck off” various holiday characters for discounts-the better you are at the game, the greater your discount, up to 30% off any one item. I can’t seem to get beyond 25%, maybe I need a little more practice.

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