Digitalia | Indianapolis Social Media Marketing

Online Tunes, Great Causes and Marketing Genius

Bono, lead singer of U2 and world social leader, might be the best marketing mind out there. This week he unveiled a digital music service, yet unnamed, which will serve to raise money for AIDS relief in Africa, and provide exclusive tracks from a star-studded rolodex of rock stars and up-and-coming bands. For a $5 monthly fee, users will receive three exclusive mp3’s each week, and other, more visual content that accompanies each track. Think of it as iTunes with a conscience.

Leveraging celebrity to create community seems to be Bono’s forte in the last few years, and it’s working. From a marketing standpoint, it follows along closely with Seth Godin’s Five Easy Pieces of effective marketing, by using a product in trying to create interaction and connection among customers. The end result being the creation of a community of what Godin calls, “A band of brothers” or a “tribe” of people who want to belong to a community, and use a product or a cause to rally behind.  Really, what (Red) has created is a new Social Media Application.

Chided in the past for spending millions of dollars to raise a million dollars, (Red) has come up with a plan that puts real money into solutions for the AIDS epidemic. Plus, with artists already on board like Emmylou Harris and Elvis Costello, as well as promises for “Crackerjack Surprises” each month with the service, even this music snob can wrap his arms around it. Plus, supporting the efforts to distribute more effective and available drugs to combat the AIDS epidemic in Africa is a long overdue, and necessary venture.

-Ben

VIRAL VIDEO REVEALED TO BE AD FOR GATORADE

Have you seen the “Ball Girl” video on YouTube? A ball girl runs down the left field line at a minor league baseball game and does an unbelievable jump to catch a fly ball. The video has been viewed over 2 million times on YouTube, featured on Good Morning America, CNN, and was a most-shared video on Break.com.

Now the clip has been revealed to be a hoax – or rather – an Internet marketing campaign and ad for Gatorade. The company’s name is never mentioned – but if you look closely you will see that when the ball girl sits down after the amazing catch there’s a bottle of the popular sports drink by her feet.

On the one hand, it’s incredibly subtle, but almost any time a brand enters into pop culture discussions it’s bound to benefit – and this kind of exposure and interest is, well, “priceless.” On the other hand, authenticity-wise – I’m not so sure. What do you think?

- Chad Richards

Local Grocery Store: Brand Facelift Review

I’ve lived in Indianapolis, in a little village called Broad Ripple, for about 6 years and I absolutely love this area for the unique shopping, small coffee shops, and the great restaurants. Not to mention that I can walk or bike to anything that I need. There is a small Kroger grocery store right in the heart of the village. I’ve gone there many times, but only if I absolutely HAD to! This store has never really had a selection of fresh foods and I’ve even seen dust on canned products. The staff was always less-than-friendly, but my least favorite feature was the funky smell that used to hit you when you walked in. It smelled like an old refrigerator that had not been cleaned, ever. So my friends and I referred to this store as the “Moscow Kroger” for obvious reasons.

Recently Kroger has decided to give this store a facelift and what a difference it’s made. They’ve knocked down a few walls, brightened it up, reorganized the shopping experience – volia its a pleasant shopping experience. By making over this location it’s changed the vibe completely. I can easily get my grocery items and I’m not alone – traffic is up! There are more people shopping in there then I can ever remember seeing before the changes. I also dig that instead of the numbers that light up to tell you the check stand is open they placed Monon Trail signs (a popular nearby greenway for walking and biking) that will light up to tell you the checker is open.

Today I went to grab some lunch at Kroger and they had a Jazz Trio playing in the entry way and they were barbequing some chicken outside. When I got back to the office I wanted to see if there was anywhere on the Kroger site or a social media forum for sharing positive thoughts on this location. Although there is no provision for comments about this particular location, there is an area that you can sign up called My Kroger that allows you to register and receive the weekly ads/special coupons for your local area stores. Who could’nt use a discount on food these days, right? So, I went ahead and signed up for the weekly email updates for the ads and discounts.

Given the store facelift. I’ve now affectionately been referring to the store with it’s other moniker - K-Roger - instead of “Moscow Kroger” AND I’ve made sure that my friends and co-workers all know that is the place to shop.

Interesting how a large national corporation hasn’t harnessed the power of community (and specifically the Broad Ripple community) online to drive traffic to its updated store and build relationships with its customers.

-Angela

Nonprofit Marketing Solutions

Before I joined the amazing Firebelly, I spent about a year and a half as a volunteer in the world of fundraising for a local nonprofit, ELI. I took classes and sat through seminars offered through IU’s School of Philanthropy. I wrote grants and solicited foundations and corporations to help ELI expand their capacity. I learned a lot about raising money the hard way, by begging for it! I learned how competitive the nonprofit world is and how hard it is for young organizations to differentiate themselves from their, dare I say, competition. I know that ELI was way ahead of the pack in their use of social media, but I came away from my whole experience with a sense that the nonprofit world is behind, way behind, on this whole internet marketing strategy thing.

The fine folks at Getting Attention Blog understand that nonprofit organizations are no different than any other company or corporation. They need to get themselves in front of their constituents, the same way that traditional businesses need to get their customers’ attention.  I would recommend that NP’s take a convergence-based approach in marketing. Really, a nonprofit’s marketing shouldn’t look a lot different for a not-for-profit as it should for a traditional business. It should have room for emerging media: social media, blogs, seo, analytics, rss feeds, and even twitter.

My recommendations are simple:
- Use traditional media to drive people online
- build emotional relationships online
- Use a variety of tools to develop content, communicate regularly, collaborate, and use a rich media approach (photos, video, audio).

Plus, most local organizations that I’ve worked with are driven by passion and passionate people. What a better marketing tool than harnessing passion and good work?  George Wilhelm says, and I agree, “Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.”

-Ben

Making Sense Of Online Conversation Chaos

As we've raised our flag on the continent of social media - I've had some interesting encounters with people professing the new tool du jour (last year it was Second Life, this year it seems to be Twitter). While tools are useful and should part of an overall internet marketing strategy, I'm convinced that social media mirrors real life unlike any other form of marketing. It's about engagement. Forget the pitch - old school PR people. Forget the war talk of target audiences and blitzes. Think authentic conversations and relationship building. Think emotion.

These conversations are creating and destroying reputations, making news travel faster with many more points of view, and changing the dynamics of information absorbtion. With the proliferation of visual, app heavy, data rich mobile devices, this will only increase. Being aware of all the conversations isn't something most companies are doing. Even fewer companies are actually participating in the conversations. Save a few dollars this year and you're going to miss out on the conversations (that you're competitors might be tuned in to and participating in). While you can't lead every conversation, or even necessarily be a part of it - my recommendation is to at least be aware that these conversations are happening or that they have happened.

There are lots of tools that can help monitor these conversations - alerts, specialized search for blogs and microblogs, RSS feeds, and more. There are a lot of larger companies that, out of necessity, will have to move slower - legal, strategy, and corporate communications people that will over rule the internal evangelist in the know. And this will cause reputations to be enhanced or compromised.

But beware the quick fix. Its a social media savvy word we live in. That means you - big budget PR firms and big budget Ad cats. This isn't a one way or even two way street - its chaotic conversations everywhere, all the time. And, people or companies that break the social protocols with short sighted approaches will sacrifice brand equity.

The only approach that I believe in is a strategic approach that supports overall brand ideals and extends the core values online.

- Duncan Alney

Social Networking on Cell Phones Continues To Climb

Mobile life is blooming. It's the cell phone, not the personal computer, that is the constant companion for today's hip and socially networked – and nearly 50 mobile social networking companies have emerged globally to help cater to our need to message and communicate while on the go.

eMarketer forecasts that over 800 million people worldwide will be participating in a social network via their mobile phones by 2012, up from 82 million in 2007.

In addition to the growing audience, marketers are drawn to mobile social networking because, teamed with a mobile marketing campaign, it creates a unique context in which to promote their goods and services. It eliminates delay in response time (people don’t have to be on their computers at home to react) and adds the immediacy of sharing with friends – a powerful marketing proposition.

Because very few people leave home without them, cell phones have become, and will remain, the most immediate and personal way to connect with consumers – no matter where they roam.

- Chad Richards

Make it Easy to Navigate

CNN had a story, today, on a little Parisian teashop called Chajin (the name means tea master). The report pointed out that the little business gets half of its business from its online store. Knowing that my husband is very interested in tea, I decided to check out the website. Understandably, the default language is French but it was hard work finding the language translation button – I found it after looking for several seconds and trying a couple of buttons unsuccessfully. Finally, I finally saw a tiny blinking American flag link to change the language to English.

 

I consider myself to be a pretty savvy online navigator and I was having trouble, which makes me think I am not alone. 

The point is that websites shouldn’t make their audiences work so hard. It’s a respect issue, but more importantly – it makes good sense to not risk losing a potential lifetime customer because of bad design. In our instant gratification world, people want to be engaged instantly and navigate the site to find the info they are looking for quickly. 

The Firebelly credo places heavy emphasis on design – engagement value and intuitive navigation being some of the key components. Besides, the website is an online manifestation of the real world entity. Thus, there are no templates or cookie cutters - everything is customized to each individual company. We’ve been accused of “monetizing our client’s needs poorly”. You’re right. But it’s our long-term relationships and good design that matter to us. That’s our secret sauce. Pun intended.

We’re not a group of nerds or a group of design snobs. We’re really a mixture of design, pop culture geeks, techies, and people that like to do business with respect and passion. This cocktail approach to team building has given us a useful fluency that we’ve extended into planning for engagement on other web-based planes – social media! And so we’ve added a dash of Search Engine Optimization and some analytics – so we can measure results. Just having an online presence is not enough anymore – passionate engagement is the only way to win and keep customer’s hearts and minds.

-Angela

Digital Video Tip: Vimeo Widget

Vimeo now offers a time-saving video widget for Facebook, Hubnut, Badge, and OS X Dashboard. When you upload your videos to Vimeo it will automatically add the clips to your specified website.

Adding the Vimeo widget:

1. Go to www.vimeo.com and log in
2. Click on “Tools” and then “Make Widgets”
3. Select which platform you want to use
4. Once the widget is on your site don’t forget to link it to your Vimeo account!

Once you have the widget linked back to your Vimeo site it will automatically update when you upload a new video – syndicating that video podcast even further and saving you from the hassle of having to upload the same video to multiple sites multiple times. Try it on your site!

- Lain Ewing

A Million Dollar Idea

Recently, I was doing some general background research on Internet marketing strategy when I came across a link for the Million Dollar Homepage. Having never heard of it before, I was quite intrigued; in letting my curiosity get the better of me, I stumbled upon a small work of marketing genius - this is how I interpreted it to be anyway.

For those who don’t know, milliondollarhomepage.com was the brainchild of 21-year-old UK student, Alex Tew. Tew came up with the idea while “brainstorming ideas to make money for uni” (‘uni’ meaning university). The big idea being that every pixel has a link behind it and costs a dollar.

The results have been phenomenal. He launched the site in late 2005 and by January 2006, the final pixels had been sold - bringing Tew’s revenue from the project to a little over his intended goal of one million dollars.

The story represents three important concepts regarding internet marketing – (a) monetization (b) sheer potential and (c) the viral quality - all of course for a good idea that is well executed. Here is a young man, the same age as myself, who was able to take nothing more than a good idea and turn it in to a million dollars. The Internet truly is the “land of opportunity” where anyone with a good idea, enough drive, and a little bit of luck can make a million dollars…or more.

- Jon Collier

ALLTOP: AGGREGATION WITHOUT THE AGGRAVATION

Alltop gathers the best suggested blogs and news sites from the most active social web users and compiles links into a simple, clean discovery space. The headlines and first paragraph of the five most recent stories from forty to eighty sources for 90+ topics are displayed - kind of like"online magazine rack" refreshed every ten minutes.

It's a great site for the 99% of Internet users not using RSS feed readers and for those, like me, who are often annoyed and overwhelmed by them.

And thanks to our blog readers and their support, Digitalia is now featured on Alltop as one of "all the top" sites on the web about social media. We can even put one of these sassy badges on our blog now:

To see Digitalia, as well as a list of other great related feeds I recommend checking out socialmedia.alltop.com. Thanks again to our readers for their support!

- Chad Richards

Press Release Grader

HubSpot Internet Marketing has created Press Release Grader – a tool to measure the effectiveness of your press releases.

You simply copy and paste your press release into the given area and are instantly returned your grade out of 100, general statistics such as word count and readability, suggestions, link analysis and a word cloud. The information is both displayed on the website and e-mailed to you. While I don’t know how effective a piece of software can be at grading press releases, it was interesting to see how my releases measured up. In creating this tool, HubSpot is also maintaining a good example of how to up your SEO by providing links to articles on their website, the ability for you to easily link back to your press release grade and instructional YouTube videos.

Watch the video to learn more about Press Release Grader.

Julia Yoder

Branding and Campaign Strategy

Warning, warning! Political content ahead! No candidate endorsements follow! But Firebelly Marketing does endorse the practice of voting!

If you want to watch branding in action and brand transformation in process, election cycles provide excellent case studies. This year’s presidential campaigns, now 18 months old, have demonstrated the necessity as well as the savvy of political marketing. One of the core brand elements are slogans. You might even say that political slogans are essentially brand statements – catchy, clear, and concise statements about an entity’s values and work. Just like brand statements, slogans and logo reveal a lot about the core values of the candidate, and when slogans change, they also suggest how malleable their message (and their core values) really is.

Over the last week, John McCain’s campaign implemented a new slogan: “A leader we can believe in.” Three months ago, his branding statement was: “The American president the American people have been waiting for.” Why the change? Perhaps because Barack Obama  talks about: “Change we can believe in” for almost a year, and it’s working for him politically. In the industry, we call it “benchmarking” when someone adopts a competitor’s best practices, with the aim of increasing performance. Some might call it copying, but the ending is the same.

Benchmarking can be great, as long as the message, image or content of your competitor matches your own core values and work. It needs to be authentic. But in a political campaign, candidates from dueling parties might be better served by striking out with an entirely new message, setting them apart from the competition. That’s why understanding your core values is a critical element to working on your brand. At Firebelly, we believe that your marketing strategy should rely on who you are, not who your competitors are. Yes, you want to understand competitors and colleagues and, ideally, to learn from their successes.

Maybe McCain’s camp could have learned a little something from Judy Garland, who said, “Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.”

Emerging Media: Mobile Marketing Watch

As part of keeping an eye on emerging media, and the significant growth in mobile marketing acceptance, here are some interesting facts from Cellit Marketing.

• 85% of the U.S. consumers are using mobile phones: 85% of Generation Y, 82% of Generation X, 80% of Baby boomers
• 42.8 million Americans participate in mobile marketing campaigns (as of June 2007) SMS based interactive campaigns experience response rates up to 70%
• Over 241 Billion text messages were sent in 2007. This year it is expected to reach over 300 billion!!
• 89% of all major global brands will market via mobile by 2008
• Mobile marketing has a 95% read rate. Paper advertising 2%, and email 8%

The point is that a convergence based marketing mix should have emerging media - and room for - mobile marketing.And to lighten things up a little - here’s an interesting video on the evolution on the mobile phone. How far we've come:

Find more DIY videos

FLICKR TIP: EDIT PHOTOS IN ONE PLACE (and save time)

Want to save time editing your photos and do it all in the same place? Check out the new photo-editing feature called Picnik. Here are 3 easy steps:

1) Log in to Flickr
2) Upload your picture
3) Click on the icon "edit this photo" above the photo

Once you've done that, Flickr will take you to Picnik. Not only can you crop and edit, but you can also color correct, change exposure, and, yes, you can use histograms. This feature is a time saver and lets you edit in one place! Check it out.

- Lain Ewing

More Evidence Social Media Spending Will Rise

According to Eloqua's State of the Marketer report, more than three-quarters of marketers surveyed said they will increase their social media spending during the next three years. 74% will spend more on email marketing and about two-thirds will increase their mobile marketing spending.

Respondents were strong on online ad spending overall - nine out of 10 said they would continue to increase their direct online ad budgets. The spending increases are likely to come at the expense of print ads, since 55% of respondents said they will decrease print ad spending in the next three years.

I believe this confirms that social media and mobile marketing efforts are indeed on the minds of many marketers who deem them to be crucial components of any successful marketing campaign - both now and in the future. It also serves as somewhat of a reminder that " good ol' fashioned" email marketing is neither dead nor being ignored.

What do you think?

- Chad Richards

Social Network for Book Lovers

As part of being an analyst of internet marketing strategy, I am constantly looking for apps that demonstrate usefulness and stickiness mixed with community, connection (with other users) and choice.

I have always wished there was an iTunes for books, especially when I finished the last book I read THE ROAD by Cormac McCarthy. I was not really sure where to go after reading this book.  There is Amazon.com but I have never found their recommendations of any value.  I stumbled upon a website that ranked the most beautiful websites; there was a site that caught my eye, Shelfari.com. This site design is very user friendly and more appealing than myspace. Shelfari lets you add and review all the books you have read - displaying them on your profile in a very cool bookshelf – along with your ratings and review comments.
 

You can connect with other people that have read and or reviewed the same books you have.  Shelfari also offers the opportunity to “hunt down” the other books they have read.  I have only been a member of Shelfari for a few days but I’m excited to explore and find some like-minded people that will help me find my next books.

Angela

Internet Marketing Strategy: The world is blog-crazy

Everyone these days has a blog. It’s our public journal, the new marketing tool, the electronic forum opportunity, and an extension of our public persona. Marketing gurus evangelize about the importance of businesses using blogs. Part of Firebelly’s strategy for clients is to incorporate a balance of all kinds of social media to effectively get in front of people on the internet, and not be too overly concentrated in one area. We love blogs, but we have clients who don’t. The reason most often cited is that there’s millions of blogs, and nobody’s reading them. It’s true, in a way, there’s lots of competition.

The amazing and talented folks at Creating Passionate Users agree and provide some key guidelines. My favorite blog, EarlBoykins Blog, incorporates CPU’s every method of competing for attentions. Named after the shortest man in professional basketball, and a man who has spent his career staring up at his competition while taking them head on. EarlBoykins Blog is provocative, visual, challenging, stimulating, content changes daily. Plus, who else out on the interwebs is reviewing records and concerts using charts and graphs?

Besides content-based thought leadership - blogging has other benefits too, like improving your site’s search engine optimization and building web traffic (for your website). It allows you to have a rapid fire place to share news with your stakeholders. Ultimately, blogging helps articulate the “brand”, and the best way to compete with the millions of others is to be passionate, and be yourself. Internet Marketing Strategy, according to Firebelly Marketing, is about building emotional relationships with your customers - making them feel connected to your business.