Think eNewsLetter July 2007

creative briefs

There are a lot of bad websites out there in the Internet cosmos, but there are some that are worth visiting.

Time Magazine recently penned a piece about the 50 Best Websites of 2007. Their list includes some of my favorites, too: LinkedIn, StumbleUpon. and Polling Report.

Public relations is often used to promote new products, and you can use public relations to support various other sales and marketing objectives.

Whatever your goals, there are many ways you can enhance product public relations using a variety of media. This article provides some tips.

Trade magazines often are understaffed and underfunded. What does this mean for the savvy media relations practitioner? Ink!

A well-conceived pitch, an op-ed piece, company profiles and even new product releases may find a place in the trades. Here is an excellent directory of trades and their editorial contacts.

Search engine optimization - or SEO - is an increasingly important component of a company's website promotion program.

But it can be expensive. So, for the do-it-yourselfer, here is an article about the Top Five Free SEO Tools.

Choosing and implementing a rock-solid marketing strategy, according to an excellent article on BNET, is probably the single most important factor contributing to the long-term sustainable success of any business venture.

Read what Wikipedia has to say about marketing strategy, or visit MarketingPower, the website of the American Marketing Association, which has a solid library of articles on the subject.

Hello. Color conveys much without saying a word. We'll take a look at the psychology of color as it applies to branding, consider better media pitches, as well as serve up our usual plethora of helpful links.

There's still time to win one of our My Creative Team memory sticks. Find out how, here.

Let's get going.

Creatively yours,

Harry Hoover
harry@my-creativeteam.com

Color Me Orange

By Harry Hoover

It seems that every major - and minor - corporation adopts blue or red for their brand identity color scheme. These colors may be "safe" but are not necessarily the best choices for your brand.

Colors convey meaning in every society, including our own. Understanding the meaning of colors can help you communicate the right brand message.

For instance, my company's color palette includes orange, gray and white. These colors make sense in the overall branding scheme of things. Consider our positioning statement: "For businesses which want their critical communications projects on target and on time, My Creative Team is the resource that consistently delivers top quality, strategically focused marketing communications work that makes you look good and that is a good value."

The Wind Up And The Pitch

By Harry Hoover

Successfully pitching a story idea to the media is just good marketing. Follow a few simple marketing rules, then wind up and let 'er rip.

Just as in marketing, we first need to develop a positioning statement for the product: our story idea. Write a brief outline, including the proposed angle for the story, possible news hooks and the people who would be appropriate to interview for the piece. Any supporting statistics would be a bonus.

So, let's say your story idea is about the changing face of advertising, which has not kept up with market changes like the Internet, the downsizing of corporate America and the decline of the mass media.

Your angle is focused on a new type of marketing firm that is made up of independent freelancers, who have left the agency world. The firm has low overhead because it assembles only the highly experienced freelance experts it needs for the project and then disbands once the project is complete. Corporations are hiring the firm because they have downsized and gone lean, so they understand and appreciate the firm's model.