Community extends beyond the city limits

Social media, online communities and engagement are popular buzzwords. Every marketer seems to be thinking about the next great way to get customers to interact online — to come together as a result of the brand.

In my opinion, it’s human nature to want to gather together and share common experiences. But forget about computers and the Internet for a moment, and instead think about the original, offline community.

I grew up in a small town of about 2,000 people in Cuba City, Wis. It’s rural; small family farms dot the landscape, and you can often find yourself stuck behind a slow-moving piece of farm equipment when you’re almost to your destination. And, typical in Cuba City or any small town, news can travel fast — whether it’s good news or tragic news. I’ve seen the small community of Cuba City rally together to celebrate the feats of the high school sports teams, as well as come together to mourn a loss. It’s something I’ve probably taken for granted now that I live in Milwaukee, but it still humbles me when I hear of how a small community comes together to make a big impact.

Photo courtesy of Jennifer Gleason, Hazel Green, Wis.Just down the road from Cuba City is an even smaller community called Hazel Green. The village boasts a population of 1,200 living in a very close-knit neighborhood. It offers quiet, country-like living but is close to the three main cities in the tri-state area of southwestern Wisconsin.

This close-knit neighborhood grew even closer when U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Jesse Grindey, a Hazel Green native, died in Afghanistan serving his country. He

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Facebook’s Subscribe: A tool for PR pros

Back in September, Facebook debuted the Subscribe feature, which essentially allows personal profiles to operate publicly as well. For example, if I add the Subscribe button to my profile, people who are not friends with me on Facebook can get my public updates in their News Feeds. These subscribers will see only the posts that I share publicly. So what does this mean for journalists and PR professionals?

As this guide describes, Facebook Subscribe is very much a model of following like Twitter’s. With Facebook, however, you get the added ability to control how many updates you see from the people you subscribe to — all updates, most updates or only the important ones. And when you, in turn, decide to opt in to the Subscribe function and let the public view your content, you can choose to let subscribers comment on your posts or not.

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Please vote!

Please go to facebook.com/partnersforhumanity and vote for the Urban Ecology Center. If the ad we created for them has the most votes by Dec. 6, the Urban Ecology Center will receive a $500 donation.

Partners for Humanity is an annual program that’s centered on giving back to the community. Advertising agencies in Milwaukee — like us! — create pro-bono ad

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Branding is nuts

I recently read the Forbes article “Comeback Brands of 2011” which lists 10 well-known consumer brands poised for a comeback this year. These brands never went away; they just lost the public eye. Why? All brands struggle to stay fresh; if they can’t they are in trouble. The comeback brands—including Chevrolet, Levi’s, Pert, and Planters Peanuts—failed to maintain a dialogue with their audiences, they failed to keep the conversation going. That’s why they need to make a comeback.    

What unites them is their effort to tap into nostalgia branding. When we reflect on our past, we tend to have warm memories and positive associations. Our attitudes toward brands are no different. All of the brands featured in the article have long histories and hope to evoke their past brand equity while making it relevant for today. The result aims to reconnect with older audiences while attracting new ones. 

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Finding a brand identity through social media

Photo credit: okgo.netIt seems hard to believe now, but there was once a time when music videos dominated MTV programming. It’s true. Unfortunately those days are now far gone, and this development has left many musical artists grasping at straws over how to share their music with the world while showcasing their creativity. The Chicago-raised and Los Angeles-based band OK Go has been one of the few groups to display the foresight and social media savviness necessary to sidestep the pothole that has derailed other bands.

In my nearly 29 years on this planet, I have rarely seen an OK Go video on television or heard an OK Go song on the radio. That hasn’t stopped the band from developing a strong cult following, thanks in large part to its ahead-of-the-times utilization of YouTube.

OK Go made its first major splash in 2006 when it unleashed “Here It Goes Again” on the digital world. This video came during a time when YouTube was used primarily by pet owners looking to show off their cat’s inability to escape a paper bag. It would proceed to win a Grammy for “Best Short-Film Music Video” and the 2006 YouTube Award in the Most Creative category. The video, to this day, remains one of the top 50 most-watched videos in YouTube history.

OK Go realized the power of social mediums like YouTube far before any other bands, and used that power to share its music and build its brand. In some ways, OK Go pioneered the use of the phrase, “going viral.” The band was once a little-known independent outfit that gained widespread notoriety in quick fashion through the Internet and social media. It’s viral marketing at its finest.

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3 great sites you may not know a lot about

Staying on top of digital trends is difficult. That’s why we’ve started the BR Digital Roundup where you can find out about great websites and applications. This week’s focus is on how to save money, claim your business and easily share photos. Learn all about Groupon, Facebook Places and Yogile.

 
GROUPON is a group coupon offer distributed daily. Heavily discounted items are available to a group of subscribers. If enough people purchase the item, the entire group gets the discount. 

In the past, Groupon offers have focused on local services like food, massage or maintenance. This week, the Chicago-based company grabbed the spotlight when news of its Aug. 19 Gap Groupon spread.

Nearly half a million people bought $50 worth of Gap merchandise for only $25. “Superbliz,” is how Reuters coined this experiment. What’s more, Groupon is already worth $1 billion and the impact on small businesses has been tremendous.

What’s the next step?

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Listening still reigns supreme in social media strategy

It’s not a new concept, but it’s still an essential one. To be successful in social media you need audience insights and listening is a great way to get those insights.

We have tackled the topic of listening on this blog before. We’ve even gone so far as recommending Alterian SM2 as our listening vendor of choice. And it’s our working relationship with SM2 that’s made social media monitoring a core service offering for clients.

But, regardless of which listening tools you use, monitoring social channels is a powerful component that helps us provide sound strategic counsel. Monitoring allows us to make more informed decisions about the best way our clients can engage with target audiences.

One of the most interesting things I’ve learned from listening programs is that sometimes the level of conversation in a marketplace or around a brand is low. On the surface this may seem like a reason to ignore the social media space. The exact opposite is true. This often means that with little effort a brand can grab a significant share of voice. Without monitoring we would not know the opportunity exists. Likewise, in an issues management situation you now have data to help assess conversations taking place and decide if the issues management plan that was prepared has to be deployed.

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After Hours: Three keys to marketing dairy cattle

During the day, I practice PR on behalf of the dairy portion of the Pfizer Animal Health business. On nights and weekends, I like to spend my time working with a group of Brown Swiss dairy cattle owned by my wife and two younger brothers which we call Brothers Three Brown Swiss.

Since we don’t milk cows, we rely on showing and merchandising our Brown Swiss to generate income and cash flow for our business.  One of the things I love about my job is being able to take the strategies and marketing recommendations we share with our clients every day and apply them to our own cattle marketing business.

In the video below, I share several keys to marketing our business that have proven successful in recent years.

Coming soon to a news feed near you

We’re embarking on a bold new journey. One filled with pokes, status updates and serious business like what kind of monkey should be our softball team’s mascot.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Love it or hate it, social media is here to stay

I’ll admit it. I had my doubts about Facebook when I first created my account. Is it necessary? Do I really need it? But now, more than a year later, I’ve come to rely on social media tools like Facebook, Twitter, and have even become more active on LinkedIn. I’ve used these to reconnect with friends and family, and on a professional level to connect with people from all over the world that share my work background and interests — and it’s fun!

Recently, I came across this blog post about marketing to Generation Y and started to think about the number of people/children that will never know life without social media, without websites like Twitter or Facebook. It got me thinking about how these social media tools have already changed, and will continue to transform the way we communicate.

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Think Web, not just Web site

The role of the corporate Web site is changing. As more information finds audiences via RSS feeds, text messages and status updates, trends point to the corporate web site becoming less important. Emerging social channels are forcing companies to think beyond their Web sites to join the growing number of online platforms to reach their target audiences.

As marketers make this transition from thinking Web site to simply thinking Web, it’s important that the main strategic driver remain the same — providing target audiences with high quality, timely, relevant content. After that, it is just a matter of creating your own mix of platforms to match your audience. Publish content on YouTube and Facebook. Tweet it and blog about it too. In many cases a good corporate blog is surpassing the corporate Web site in visits and contains much more pertinent and timely content.

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Is e-mail dying?

Social media has changed communication. With the quick pace of social media, some have argued that e-mail now seems slower, less collaborative and more restricting. People are getting tired of opening, closing, replying and deleting. They want to stream.

Twitter, Facebook, Google Wave and others allow for faster communication via streams of information that are constantly flowing. More like a river of information you can interact with than a letter you either open or close. But of course, streaming has its drawbacks, too.

Jessicca Vascellaro wrote about how social media is changing e-mail in a Wall Street Journal piece titled, Why Email No Longer Rules. The article discusses some of the changes, technologies and questions many people have about social media.

Vascellaro doesn’t have all the answers. No one really does. That’s what makes the communications field so fun right now! But this article does a nice job of summing up the challenges ahead and it provides some conversation thought-starters.  

So I’ll throw it out to you. Is e-mail (as we know it today) dying?

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Most important social media tool: Listening

I have a whiteboard in my office where I keep track of our client to-do’s as well as upcoming meetings and engagements. Out of eight items on the list right now, seven are related to the buzz-worthy topic of social media. As you well know, plenty of content exists today on the subject — books, articles, tweets, YouTube videos, Wikipedia entries, you name it.

Because of this trend, many of our clients are eager to know more: “What is it? Where do I start? How do I apply these principles in our markets? What kind of results can I expect?”

But before we map out a social media plan as part of a larger marketing communications effort, our strategic counsel holds that the first step in any social media engagement should always be listening.

Why listen?

• To identify who’s talking about our companies, brands, products and services
• To discover what they’re saying
• To learn how influential they are
• To see how fast the word is spreading (or if it’s spreading)
• To add value to competitive research
• To better inform our communications plans moving forward

To be sure you’re going about this the right way, there are a plethora of free tools that can help you identify a broad range of conversation levels — TweetScan, BackType, BoardReader, BlogPulse, Google Insights, Technorati, and Google Trends to name a few.

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My virtual high school reunion

I think I’m beginning to better understand my 14-year-old daughter. No, I haven’t uncovered the secret to a teenage girl’s mind (that would be priceless). I’m beginning to understand the benefits of communicating the way she and her friends do.

I graduated from high school in the1980s and since then have attended only one class reunion. Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I don’t want to reconnect with former classmates. It’s just that life gets in the way. Things like family trips, business meetings, and taking kids to summer camp all take precedence over spending time with people you haven’t seen since you were 18 years old.

Enter Facebook.

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Marcom A to Z — E for e-

Pick your favorite digital application: Web sites, e-mail, Facebook, Twitter. If you’re unfamiliar with and aren’t learning about these tools, you’ll become professionally obsolete. It’s that simple. Technology drives the entire marketing industry today.

I’ll focus on PR in this post. These new channels add tools to the arsenal that facilitate information collection and distribution, as well as conversation and dialogue. To Grant Thekan’s point in his post, Digital marketing lesson from Sir Alex, it’s important to strategically choose the right e-channels for a given situation. Failing to at least consider all available channels is to practice PR in a vacuum.

Today, it’s do (adopt and evolve) or die (by becoming irrelevant).

I read an interesting blog post recently by Valeria Maltoni about Google Wave, a new online communication and collaboration tool to be launched later this year: Will Google Wave Eliminate the Need for PR as Media Relations? Threatening! Will PR lose a tool or part of its strength with the next technological evolution?

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