THINKing

Off Topic: Summer Meme

Maddie Grant tagged me with the Summer Meme, started by The Buzz Bin. So, here goes:

SUMMER MEME

4 things you like about summer

1. Thunderstorms
2. Patio wining and dining at Positano, Eez or Corkscrew
3. Early morning kayaking on Mountain Island Lake
4. Driving the Blue Ridge Parkway with the windows down

4 of your favorite vacation destinations

1. Asheville, NC - good restaurants, funky vibe and mountains
2. Charleston, SC - history, great restaurants and good friends live there
3. Anywhere outdoors in North Carolina’s mountains
4. Big Sur, California

4 of your favorite summer foods

1. Home-grown tomatoes
2. Pole beans
3. Home-made peach ice cream
4. Grilled pork loin

4 concerts not to miss

1. Charlotte Symphony in the park
2. The Tommy Castro Band (which I missed)
3. Any band that plays outside at the fountain in Birkdale Village
4. Michael Buble

4 things to avoid during the summer

1. Sunburns
2. Mosquitoes
3. Copperheads
4. Lake Norman on crowded weekends

So, I’m tagging a few people I’d like to find out more about. So, how about participating in the summer meme:

Patrick Evans

Joshua DeLung

Jay Ehret

Rodger Johnson

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More Dusty Archives

Photo Courtesy of Morguefile
Let’s look back through the dusty archives for another dose of good stuff THINKing has served up in the past year.

Know Your Media - Newspapers

It’s The Relationship, Stupid

46 Essential PR Links

Sex Sells

Media Relations How-To From My Creative

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Get Your Filtr On

PR Pros have been paying tons of money for media clips for eons, and some still need to have a paid service to keep up with everything said about them, their organization or their clients. But, there is a new service that the smaller company can set up for free, called FiltrBox that offers many of the same features of the higher priced services. The service now is out of beta, according to the FiltrBox blog,

Information Overload and overpriced media monitoring are now a thing of the past! We are thrilled to announce that the Filtrbox media monitoring service is now available to the public. The service emerges from private beta today with an entirely new user interface and a number of new features.

Here’s what you get for free:

• Up to five separate filters and 15 days of article history
• Entirely new Flex user interface
• Additional sources, including Twitter and FriendFeed monitoring
• Search, Sort, and Preferences
• iPhone formatted Daily Briefing emails
• Flagging of important articles
• Google Alerts import
• Drag and Drop Filtr management
• Content widgets based on custom RSS feeds

Sign up for FiltrBox here.

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Is Your Marketing At C-Level?

Top executives are moving steadily toward the online environment. Big surprise. According to an online study from Forbes.com and Gartner,

…the Internet continues to be the most influential and important source of business information for C-Level executives around the world, at 67%. This number has increased 37% since 2004. At the same time, C-Level executives, citing newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal as their main source of business information, has decreased 36% since 2004.

This move into heavier usage of online media, however, has not reduced their usage of other media, according to Ipsos. This study indicates that nearly half of C-Level respondents are still utilizing other media as heavily as they ever have, as you’ll see in the chart below.

Are you using a multimedia approach to reach C-level executives?

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I Feel So Used

Many agency people steer clear of clients who have never before utilized the services of outside creative resources. There often is a steep learning curve on how to properly utilize an agency most efficiently and effectively.  But often even corporations which regularly use outside resources also regularly misuse them. So, let’s review some best practices in getting the most out of your agency, no matter where you are in the marketing spectrum.

Agree On Expectations Upfront. Outline in writing your expectations and your objectives for the ad agency and its work. The larger and more comprehensive the project, the more important this becomes. The old adage is true: unspoken expectations are premeditated resentments.

Team Up. You will get the best work if you treat the agency like a partner and not like a vendor. Share business data, sales goals and other crucial information with your agency partner.

You Are The Expert. Don’t expect your agency to know your business better, or even as well, as you do. The agency knows how to develop and communicate messages and may have some knowledge of your industry, but it is up to you to provide agency personnel with the benefit of your market expertise. Provide a background briefing covering such information as market size and key competitors. Additionally, there are certain basic things an agency needs to know whether it is working on collateral material, news releases or full-blown ad campaigns. A good agency will know the right questions to ask, such as those about the demographic, psychographic and geographic make-up of your audience, the benefit of the product or service featured, and the objective of the communication.

Keep An Open Mind. Yes, you are the expert, but you may be too close to the business. Sometimes you know too much for your own good, and it clouds your thinking. Your agency provides an objective opinion, and also acts as an advocate for the consumer who will be receiving your message. So, be open to suggestions from the agency on different approaches to the problem.

Let The Agency Do Its Job. You are a marketer, who may be creative, but you are not a fulltime copywriter or art director. For good reason, agencies hate the “I’ll know it when I see it” school of creative approval. So, for best results, don’t take concept A and try to merge it with concept B. And, please don’t let your spouse make the final decision on the work.

Edits Have Their Time & Place. Agencies don’t expect their work to get through the review process with no changes. But that is the time to make them. Copy should be approved before layout begins. Layout should be approved before the work heads to a printer. Remember, changes cost less at the beginning of the process than at the end.

It’s really all about proper communication between client and agency. Doing this improves the chances of developing effective communications that will achieve your objectives.

Do you have agency/client stories? Do tell.

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Green Content Marketing

Photo Courtesy of Morguefile
Hey, everyone is getting into the green movement. So, why not content marketers? When I was a reporter back in the 20th Century, we had a term for features that had a long shelf life. We called them evergreen. These were the items you could pull out again and again, season after season and re-run with only a bit of editing.

Content marketers need to get back on the green bandwagon by reusing, recycling and repurposing their content. Here are a few ways I do it.

Enewsletter to blog, blog to enewsletter. I do a monthly enewsletter called Think. Feel free to sign up. Typically, the newsletter has two fairly lengthy primary articles plus a series of briefs. All content is aimed at marketing professionals. This newsletter and my blog, THINKing (RSS feed), have discrete audiences. So, I am able to move slightly edited content back and forth between the two to reach these separate audiences.

Blog to blog. THINKing has had a surge in visitors, so I know that not everyone has seen all of the good content we have produced. Occasionally, I’ll run a feature like The Dusty Archives to showcase some of the most popular previous items.

Microblog to blog. Twitter, the microblogging service, offers another unique opportunity to repurpose content. I write short, pithy messages based on some of my recent content and post them on Twitter with a url bringing the interested back to the blog or to my Ezinearticle site for the rest of the story.

Article to white paper. If you develop a lot of content, as I do, and have been doing it for a while, you’ll build a good sized repository. So, I’ll often look through my articles to discover a theme. Once this is done, I can take several articles, string them together and Voila! I have a white paper like this media relations white paper.

White paper to blog. Once you have the white paper completed, you also can break it back down into bite-sized chunks for use on your blog.

Those are just a few Green Content Marketing ideas. How are you recycling content?

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Activate Your Customers With Email

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I love email. It still is the best customer communication tool there is. And email is a great way to bring the online and offline worlds together. Smart businesses use email to drive store traffic. The best brand interactions, IMHO, occur between real live people. So, let’s use our email list to bring customers and our employees together.

MediaPost’s Email Insider has an excellent feature on using email to drive store traffic. According to article author Chad White, there are a few reasons to inject some occasional channel bias into your email marketing,

First, email is good at driving sales to other channels. For instance, 86% of survey respondents made an in-store purchase as a result of receiving an email, according to a recent survey by Epsilon. Second, there’s been plenty of research that has found that multichannel shoppers spend more — and the more channels they interact with, the more they spend. Third, there’s often a business need to drive subscribers to a particular channel. And fourth, different channels are better at some things than others. So if you can break out of siloed thinking and take a holistic approach to sales, there are many opportunities.

Check out Email Insider, if you have an interest in email best practices. Have you used email to drive traffic, or boost sales online? Tell us about it.

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The Dusty Archives

I was strolling through the dusty THINKing archives the other day and realized how much good stuff was in here that you may have missed. So, I’m digging out the top 10 postings of all time. Enjoy.

Top 10 Story Starter Tips for Blocked Bloggers

What Customers Want

Patience? No, Let’s Kill Something

When Billboards Go Bad

Twittering Journalists

RSS 101 Top 16 Links to Get You Started

A Bigger Logo Necessitates A Smaller Idea

Search Me

Marketing By Mistake

Top 17 Media Relations Links

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